The Individual and Society: Poems, Essays and Stories 9788131704172, 8131704173

Table of contents :
THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY
POEMS, ESSAYS AND STORIES
Contents
Department of English Textbook Committee
Introduction
CASTE/CLASS
1
Caste Laws
Notes
Questions
2
Deliverance
Notes
Questions
3
Joothan
Notes
Questions
4
Kallu
Notes
Questions
5
Bosom Friend
Notes
Questions
6
Who Were the Shudras?
Notes
Questions
GENDER
7
Shakespeare’s Sister
Notes
Questions
8
The Exercise Book
Notes
Questions
9
Girl
Notes
Questions
10
Breaking Out
Notes
Questions
11
A Prayer For My Daughter
Notes
Questions
12
Marriages Are Made
Questions
13
Yellow Fish
Questions
14
Reincarnation Of Captain Cook
Notes
Questions
15
Highway Stripper
Notes
Questions
RACE
16
Blackout
Notes
Questions
17
Telephone Conversation
Notes
Questions
18
Harlem
Questions
19
Still I Rise
Questions
20
Jump
Questions
VIOLENCE AND WAR
21
Return from the Somme
Notes
Questions
22
Dulce et Decorum Est
Notes
Qestions
23
Conscientious Objector
Notes
Questions
24
Naming of Parts
Questions
25
General, Your Tank
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
Questions
26
The Dog of Tetwal
Notes
Questions
27
A Chronicle of the Peacocks
Notes
Questions
28
The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi
Questions
LIVING IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD
29
Toys
Notes
Questions
30
Zero-Sum Game
THE UGLY FACE OF AMERICAN TRADE POLICY.
Notes
Questions
31
Indian Movie, New Jersey
Notes
Questions:
32
At the Lahore Karhai
Notes
Questions
33
Colombe
Notes
Questions
34
The Brand Expands
Notes
Questions
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 21
Copyright Acknowledgements

Citation preview

THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY POEMS, ESSAYS AND STORIES

Edited for The Department of English University of Delhi

by Vinay Sood (Co-ordinator), Motilal Nehru College Indira Prasad, Miranda House Harriet Raghunathan, Jesus and Mary College Mukti Sanyal, Bharati Mahila College Debjani Sengupta, Indraprastha College Soofia Siddique, St Stephen’s College Vinod Kumar Verma, Maharaja Agrasen College

Contents Introduction

CASTE/CLASS 1. Caste Laws Jotirao Phule 2. Deliverance Premchand 3. Joothan Omprakash Valmiki 4. Kallu Ismat Chughtai 5. Bosom Friend Hira Bansode 6. Who Were the Shudras?⋆ B.R. Ambedkar (⋆Prescribed only for the Inter-Disciplinary Concurrent course)

GENDER 7. Shakespeare’s Sister Virginia Woolf 8. The Exercise Book Rabindranath Tagore 9. Girl Jamaica Kincaid 10. Breaking Out Marge Piercy 11. A Prayer for My Daughter W. B. Yeats 12. Marriages Are Made Eunice De Souza 13. Yellow Fish Ambai 14. Reincarnation of Captain Cook Margaret Atwood

15. Highway Stripper A.K. Ramanujan

RACE 16. Blackout Roger Mais 17. Telephone Conversation Wole Soyinka 18. Harlem Langston Hughes 19. Still I Rise Maya Angelou 20. Jump Nadine Gordimer

VIOLENCE AND WAR 21. Return from the Somme Siegfried Sassoon 22. Dulce et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen 23. Conscientious Objector Edna St Vincent Millay 24. Naming of Parts Henry Reed 25. General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle Bertolt Brecht 26. The Dog of Tetwal Sa’adat Hasan Manto 27. A Chronicle of the Peacocks Intizar Husain 28. Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi Amitav Ghosh

LIVING IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD⋆ (⋆This entire section is prescribed only for the BA Discipline course)

29. Toys Roland Barthes 30. Zero-Sum Game Bibhas Sen 31. Indian Movie, New Jersey Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 32. At the Lahore Karhai Imtiaz Dharker 33. Colombe Edward Brathwaite 34. The Brand Expands Naomi Klein

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH TEXTBOOK COMMITTEE

Manju Jain (Chairperson) Gautam Chakravarty (Convener) Subarno Chattarji Anjana Sharma Ira Raja

Introduction This anthology of essays, short stories and poems has been designed to be relevant, up-to date and interesting for first-year students. The texts have been chosen under the broad rubric of ‘The Individual and Society,’ that is, we have taken texts that raise questions of caste, class, gender, race and war, and how they affect the individual. As modern society moves towards globalization, colonial exploitation takes new forms, and people settle in new places to find work, with the result that cross-cultural encounters become a daily part of life. These issues have been reflected in the final section, ‘Living in a Globalized World.’ Since such themes are likely to appear in other courses the student is taking, such as Psychology, Sociology or Political Science, we expect the classroom to provide a fruitful cross-fertilization between the insights of literature and those of other disciplines. We have deliberately chosen texts from widely different backgrounds precisely because we want the student to appreciate the ways in which his or her situation is comparable or analogous to the experiences of other races, classes or nationalities. We also strongly feel that though our students are Indian, they cannot possibly be untouched by western and other cultural influences, and since we live in the so-called ‘global village’ the essays and stories selected should reflect that reality. However, just under half the writers in this book are originally from the Indian subcontinent, even if some now live abroad. Nearly all are twentieth-century authors as their themes and experiences are closer to the students’ world. This course makes the assumption that literature is an important and relevant way of making sense of the world we live in, though literature employs myth, metaphor, fictional characters, irony, rhyme, and other devices of language that might not be seen as legitimate in more ‘scientific’ subjects. By these means, literature can, for example, enable the reader to enter into the experience of people from other cultures and backgrounds, such as a Dalit boy rejected by a school, (Valmiki’s ‘Joothan’), or a Black African rejected as a tenant by a white landlady (Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’)—and an opportunity to compare the two. Discussion of one text in the light of other texts is therefore an important part of this course, and examination questions should also encourage this. For example, several of the chosen texts vividly illustrate the socialization of the girl child into roles acceptable to a patriarchal society and show this same phenomenon occurring in widely different cultures, inviting revealing comparisons. At least two pieces use poetic language and irony in very quiet ways to make a devastating criticism of the unnaturalness of war. We expect students to discuss how the use of language and choice of genre affect the writer’s meaning and the reader’s response. The student will be able to develop the skills of textual analysis since the course comprises poems, fictional writing and essays of different types and styles. For example, the student is encouraged to discuss irony, narrative point of view, metaphorical language or the structural devices holding a short story together. A comparison of two writers who handle similar themes in different genres or with very different techniques will also be instructive for the student. All the pieces in this anthology were chosen to fit our themes and for their readability, impact and interest. We were not concerned to represent any school of writers, any region, genre, historical period or literary development. For the purposes of this particular course the background of the writers is not the main focus, so only the essential information has been provided. Teachers may even be completely unfamiliar with a particular author. This should not matter. If the text is allowed to speak for itself the students will develop confidence in their own insights and interpretations. The teacher can then help the students gradually build more sophisticated concepts from these scattered insights. We hope that animated discussion rather than droning lectures will be the hallmark of this course. We shall have succeeded in our aim if this anthology inspires students to find out more about the writers represented and read more of their works.

While preparing it we have discovered many authors new to us and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves; we hope your experience is equally stimulating.

CASTE/CLASS

1 Caste Laws Jotirao Phule Jotirao Phule (1827–90), the son of a mali, completed his primary education in 1838. Later, he studied in the Scottish Mission’s High School in Pune and completed his secondary education in 1848. By this time his father, Govindrao, had become a successful building contractor. The family business gave him enough financial support and he decided not to accept a job under the then British Government. The British takeover of Pune in 1818 meant that power was no longer directly in the hands of the Brahmans. The end of the Peshwai, called the ‘Brahmanya Raj’ opened up the possibility of challenging their domination in the new political configuration. This is to be seen in the challenge from below represented by Phule and the non-Brahman cultural movement in nineteenthcentury Maharashtra. This chapter is an extract from the ‘Preface’ to Gulamgiri (1873), Phule’s best known work. Its publication was followed by the founding of the Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of the Seekers of Truth) in September 1873, the movement launched by Phule which he hoped would end the slavery inherent in the caste system. Attacks on the caste system, though not entirely unknown before, reached a turning point with Phule. His conceptualization of caste from a lower-caste point of view shifted attention from social mobility within the caste hierarchy to a rejection of the system itself. Phule wrote his last work Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak(The Book of the True Faith) in early 1889. He died the following year, on 28 November 1890. ‘The day that reduces a man to slavery takes from him the half of his virtue.’ Homer ‘Our system of Government in India is not calculated to raise the character of those subject to it, nor is the present system of education one to do more than over-educate the few, leaving the mass of the people as ignorant as ever and still mere[0] at the mercy of the few learned; in fact, it is an extension of the demoralizing Brahmin-ridden policy, which perhaps, has more retarded the progress of civilization and improvement in India generally than anything else.’ Col. G.J. Hally—On Fisheries in India ‘Many ages have elapsed since peculiar resources were afforded to the Brahmins; but the most considerate cosmopolite would hesitate to enroll them among the benefactors of the world. They boast of vast stores of ancient learning. They have amassed great riches, and been invested with unbounded power, but to what good end? They have cherished the most degrading superstitions and practised the most shameless impostures. They have arrogated to themselves the possession and enjoyment of the rarest gifts of fortune and perpetuated the most revolting system known to the world. It is only from a diminution of their abused power that we can hope to accomplish the great work of national regeneration.’ Mead’s Sepoy Revolt

Recent researches have demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that the Brahmins * were not the aborigines of India. At some remote period of antiquity, probably more than 3000 years ago, the Aryan progenitors of the present Brahmin race descended upon the plains of Hindoo Koosh, and other adjoining tracts. … The extreme fertility of the soil in India, its rich productions, the proverbial wealth of its people, and the other innumerable gifts which this favoured land enjoys, and which have more recently tempted the cupidity of the Western nations, no doubt, attracted the Aryans, who came to India not as simple emigrants with peaceful intensions of colonization, but as conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted. Such self-gratulatory, pride-flattering epithets as etc. with which they designated themselves, confirm us in our opinion of their primitive character, which they have preserved up to the present time, with, perhaps little change for the better. The aborigines who the Aryans subjugated, or displaced, appear to have been a hardy and brave people from the determined front which they offered to these interlopers. Such opprobrious terms, as Sudra ‘insignificant, ‘ ‘the great foe’ etc. with which they designated them, undoubtedly show that originally they offered the greatest resistance in their power to their establishing themselves in the country, and hence the great aversion and hatred in which they are held. From many customs traditionally handed down to us, as well as from the mythological legends contained in the sacred books of the Brahmins, it is evident that there had been a hard struggle for ascendancy between the two races. The wars of Devas and Daityas, or the Rakshasas, about which so many fictions are found scattered over the sacred books of the Brahmins, have certainly a reference to this primeval struggle. The original inhabitants with whom these earthborn Gods, the Brahmins, fought were not inappropriately Rakshas, that is the protectors of the land. The incredible and foolish legends regarding their form and shape are no doubt mere chimeras, the fact being that these people were of superior stature and hardy make. Under such leaders as Brahma, Purshram and others, the Brahmins waged very protracted wars against the original inhabitants. They eventfully succeeded in establishing their supremacy and subjugating the aborigines to their entire control. Accounts of these conquests, enveloped with a mass of incredible fiction, are found in the books of the Brahmins. In some instances they were compelled to emigrate, and in others wholesale extermination was resorted to. The cruelties which the Europeans settlers practiced on the American Indians on their first settlement in the new world, had certainly their parallel in India on the advent of the Aryans and their subjugation of the aborigines. The cruelties and inhuman atrocities which Purshram committed on the Kshetrias, the people of this land, if we are to believe even one tenth of what the legends say regarding him, surpass our belief and show that he was more a fiend than a God…. This, in short, is the history of Brahmin domination in India. The institution of Caste, which has been the main object of their deep cunning is evident from their own writings. The highest rights, the highest privileges and gifts, and everything that would make the life of a Brahmin easy, smooth going and happy—everything that would conserve or flatter their self-pride, —were specially inculcated and enjoined, whereas the Sudras and Atisudras were regarded with supreme hated and contempt, and the commonest rights of humanity were denied them. Their touch, nay, even their shadow, is deemed a pollution. They are considered as mere chattels, and their life of no more value than that of meanest reptile; for it is enjoined that if a Brahmin, ‘kill a cat or an ichneumon*, the bird Chasha, or a frog or a dog, a lizard, an owl, a crow or a Sudra’ he is absolved of his sin by performing a fasting penance, perhaps for a few hours or a day and requiring not much labour or trouble. While for a Sudra to kill a Brahmin is considered the most heinous offence he could commit, and the forfeiture of his life is the only punishment his crime is considered to merit. Happily for our Sudra brethren of the present day our enlightened British Rulers have not recognized these preposterous, inhuman and unjust penal enactments of the Brahmin legislators. They no doubt regard them more as ridiculous fooleries than as equitable laws. Indeed, no man possessing even a grain of common sense would regard them as otherwise. Any one, who feels disposed to look a little more into the laws and ordinances as embodied in the Manava Dharma Shastra and other works of the same class, would undoubtedly be impressed with the deep cunning underlying them all. It may not, perhaps, be out of place to cite here a few more instances in which the superiority or excellence of the Brahmins is held and enjoined on pain of Divine displeasure:

The Brahmin is styled the Lord of the Universe, even equal to the God himself. He is to be worshipped, served and respected by all. A Brahmin can do no wrong. Never shall the King slay a Brahmin, though he has committed all possible crimes. To save the life of Brahmin any falsehood may be told. There is no sin in it. No one is to take away anything belonging to a Brahmin. A king, though dying with want, must not receive any tax from a Brahmin, nor suffer him to be afflicted with hunger or the whole kingdom will be a afflicted with famine. The feet of a Brahmin are holy. In his left foot reside all the (holy waters at places of pilgrimages) and by dipping it into water he makes it as holy as the waters at the holiest of shrines. A Brahmin may compel a man of the servile class to perform servile duty, because such a man was created by the almighty only for the purposed of serving Brahmins. A Sudra, though emancipated by his master, is not released from state of servitude; for, being born in a state which is natural to him, by whom can he be divested of his natural attributes? Let a Brahmin not give temporal advice nor spiritual counsel to a Sudra. No superfluous accumulation of wealth shall be made by a Sudra, even though he has the power to make it, since a servile man who has amassed riches becomes proud, and by his insolence or neglect he gives pain even to Brahmins. If a Sudra cohabits with a Brahminee adultress, his life is to be taken. But if a Brahmin goes even unto the lawful wife of a Sudra he is exempted from all corporal punishment. It would be needless to go on multiplying instances such as these. Hundreds of similar ordinances including many more of a worse character than these can be found scattered over their books. But what can have been the motives and objects of such cruel and inhuman Laws? They are, I believe apparent to all but to the infatuated, the blind and the self interested. Anyone who runs may read them. Their main object in fabricating these falsehoods was to dupe the minds of the ignorant and to rivet firmly on them the chains of perpetual bondange and slavery which their selfishness and cunning hand forged. The severity of the laws as affecting the Sudras, and the intense hatred with which they were regarded by the Brahmins can be explained on no other supposition but that there was, originally between the two, a deadly feud, arising as we have shown above, from the advent of the latter into this land…. This system of slavery, to which the Brahmins neduced the lower classes is in no respects inferior to that which obtained a few years ago in America. In the days of rigid Brahmin dominancy, so lately as that of the time of the Peshwa, my Sudra brethren had even greater hardships and oppression practised upon them than what even the slaves in America had to suffer. To this system of selfish superstition and bigotry, we are to attribute the stagnation and all the evils under which India has been groaning for many centuries past…. Though the Brahmin of the old Peshwa school is not quite the same as the Brahmin of the present day, though the march of Western ideas and civilization is undoubtedly telling on his superstition and bigotry, he has not as yet abandoned his time-cherished notions of superiority or the dishonesty of his ways. … Even the educated Brahmin who knows his exact position and how he has come by it, will not condescend to acknowledge the errors of his own superiority. At present, not one has the moral courage to do what only duty demands, and as long as this continues, one

sect distrusting and degrading another sect, the condition of the Sudras will remain unaltered, and India never advance in greatness or prosperity…. Perhaps a part of the blame in bringing matters to this crisis may be justly laid to the credit of the Government. Whatever may have been their motives in providing ampler funds and greater facilities for higher education and neglecting that of the masses, it will be acknowledgd by all that injustice to the latter this is not as it should be. It is an admitted fact that the greater portion of revenues of the Indian Empire are derived from the Ryot’s labour—from the sweat of his brow. The higher and richer classes contribute little or nothing to the state’s exchequer. Perhaps the most glaring tendency of the Government system of higher class education has been the virtual monopoly of all the higher offices under them by the Brahmins. If the welfare of the Ryot is at heart, if is the duty of Government to check a host of abuses, it behoves them to narrow this monopoly, day by day so as to allow a sprinkling of the other castes to get into the public service. Perhaps some might be inclined to say that it is not feasible in the present state of education. Our only reply is that if Government look a little less after higher education and more towards the education of the masses, the former being able to take care of itself, there would be no difficulty in training up a body of men every way qualified and perhaps far better in morals and manners…. It is no less the duty of such of my Sudra brethren as have received any education to place before Government the true state of their fellowmen and endeavour to the best of their power to emancipate themselves from Brahmin thraldom. Let there be schools for the Sudras in every village; but away with all Brahmin schoolmasters! The Sudras are the life and sinews of the country, and it is to them alone and not to the Brahmins that the Government must ever look to tide them over their difficulties, financial as well as political….

NOTES The epigraphs Phule’s ‘Preface’ begins with three quotations that respectively draw attention to the following aspects of his critique of the socio-political order, namely that: 1.

The caste system is analogous to slavery

2.

The British Government’s policies on education had resulted in only extending the monopoly the Brahmans traditionally had over this vital resource. Phule’s first piece of writing, Traitya Ratna, (translated as The Third Eye) was on education. He saw it as a means of empowering the lower castes and enabling them to challenge the inequalities of Hinduism.

3.

There was an urgent need to check the ‘unbounded power’ of the Brahmans. It was their claim to knowledge and the control of ‘resources’ that enabled them to wield power over the rest in traditional society.

The wars of devas and daityas: The reference is to a Hindu mythological struggle between the devas (divine beings) and daityas (demonic beings) for the amrit kumbha (the pot containing the divine nectar of immortality) as they all wanted to taste it and become immortal. Purshram: In Hindu mythology Parshuram is the sixth avatar of Vishnu. He incarnated himself as a Brahman to protect them against the Kshatriyas. Parshuram was an ardent devotee of Shiva who presented him with an axe. He is often described in Hindu mythology as the god with the Parsu or the battle-axe. Different versions of the Parshuram story record how he went on a killing spree, wielding his axe, to avenge the death of his father, sage Jamadagni, at the hands of the Kshatriya king, Kartavirya. Kshetrias: Phule occasionally uses words like Kshatriyas to refer to all non-Brahmans. It was argued at that time that in the Kaliyuga (the last of the four epochs and the one in which we live) there are supposed to be only two Varnas (Brahmans and Shudras) instead of the traditional four (Brahman, Kshatriyas, Vaishya and Shudra): Brahmanical interpretation saw this as a sign of

degeneration. Phule uses this notion to create a dichotomous concept of the Hindu social structure: in Kaliyug, therefore, at one end of the caste hierarchy is the Brahman elite and at the other end are all the rest, fused into a community of the oppressed non-Brahmins. The history of Brahman domination: G.P. Deshpande in his introduction to the Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2002, p.7) says: ‘Phule was not writing history. He was rejecting brahmanical history from a shudratishudra perspective.’ Uma Chakravarti in Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi:Kali for Women, 1998, p.71) offers a similar reading of Phule’s version of history: ‘In reinterpreting the past, Phule was deeply conscious of the need to counter the Brahmanical version of the past as a means to prise the control of knowledge from the hands of the Brahmanas…. Phule’s interpretation of the past was one aspect of the attempt to break the cycle of inequality, Brahmanic ideology…’ Sudra: The lowest of the four groups in the Chaturvarna division of Hindu society who represent an ethnic range of conquered people. According to the ideological justification of the caste system which is intrinsically hierarchical, the occupation specified for each of the four groups is thus: the Brahman is to acquire learning and to teach, the Kshatriya to fight, the Vaishya to trade and the Sudra to be an artisan, craftsman or labourer and serve the other three. Atisudra: ‘Untouchables’ or Dalit in contemporary language and Scheduled Castes in official language. The constitution provided the legal framework for the final abolition of untouchability. Manav Dharma Shastra: or Manu Smritiwhich is based on Manav Dharma Sutras. Peshwa: Shivaji, although a Maratha himself, like earlier Indian kings, staffed his administration with Brahmanas. Shahu, Shivaji’s grandson, returned to Maharashtra after being released from Mughal captivity in 1707 upon Aurangzeb’s death. In 1713 he appointed a Chitpavan Brahman as Peshwa (Chief Minister); thereafter the office became hereditary in their family and they became the de facto rulers of Maharashtra. Ryot: kisan or peasant.

QUESTIONS 1.

Why does Phule preface his arguments with a quotation on slavery?

2.

Is the slavery to which the Sudras are reduced a mental subjugation as well as a physical one?

3.

Why does Phule consider caste to be a ‘creation of their [Brahmin] deep cunning’?

4.

Would you call Phule’s style dispassionate and factual, or energetic and impassioned? Is his style effective for his purposes? Discuss with special reference to the groups addressed.

5.

Education is central to Phule’s vision of change. Discuss. OR Identify the reasons given for the extension of education to the masses.

_______________ From Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule. Edited by G.P. Deshpande, Delhi: LeftWord, 2002.

2 Deliverance Premchand Premchand (1880–1936), (real name Dhanpat Rai) was born at Lamhi, a small village near Banaras in Uttar Pradesh. His early education was in a madarsa. He wrote in both Urdu and Hindi. Soze-Watan (The Lament of the Country, 1908), his first collection of short stories written in Urdu, was declared inflammatory. Premchand was accused of sedition. All 700 copies of Soze Watan were burnt in front of him. This was the first time that the literary work of any Indian author had been treated with such hostility, although the period between 1906–1909 saw prosecutions against a large number of nationalist newspapers. Under such circumstances he could not continue with the old pen-name Nawab Rai. Dhanpat Rai then changed his pseudonym to Premchand which he continued to use after 1910. He wrote over three hundred short stories, a dozen novels, and two plays, apart from innumerable essays, comments and reviews. Known for the moral truth and realism of his writings, he modernized the form of the short story. Some of his well known novels are Sevasadan, Gaban, Nirmala and Godaan; among many others, some of the well known short stories are ‘Panch Parmeshwar,’ ‘Namak Ka Daroga,’ ‘Idgaah,’ ‘Sadgati’ and ‘Kafan’. His later short stories do not display the idealism of his early ones, most of which are steeped in the optimism of early nationalism. Neither ‘Sadgati’ (1931) nor ‘Kafan’ (1936) posit any faith either in the individual or the community to bring about change; in both, the community has degenerated into ossified caste and class relationships. He also translated fiction from Urdu and English into Hindi and edited the magazines, Madhuri and Hans. He handed over Hans to the Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad in 1935, for the promotion of Hindi or Hindustani as the national language. However, he continued to write in both Hindi and Urdu and transcended the ongoing communal controversy over the two scripts. Premchand chaired the first convention of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936: in his famous Presidential address ‘The Purpose of Literature’ he highlighted the active social role of the writer. His writings provide ample evidence of his commitment to social causes. It is no wonder then that many of his works such as Mazdoor, Seva Sadan, Godaan, Gaban, Shatranj Ke Khiladi and Sadgati, have been made into films, the last two by non other than Satyajit Ray himself. However, Premchand remains outside the canon of Dalit Literature which sees him as being merely sympathetic to but not revolutionary enough for the Dalit cause. Dukhi the tanner was sweeping in front of this door while Jhuriya, his wife, plastered the floor with cowdung. When they both found a moment to rest from their work Jhuriya said, ‘Aren’t you going to the Brahman to ask him to come? If you don’t he’s likely to go off somewhere.’ ‘Yes, I’m going,’ Dukhi said, ‘But we have to think about what he’s going to sit on.’ ‘Can’t we find a cot somewhere? You could borrow one from the village headman’s wife.’ ‘Sometimes the things you say are really aggravating! The people in the headman’s house give me a cot? They won’t even let a coal out of their house to light your fire with, so are they going to give me a cot? Even when they’re where I can go and talk to them if I ask for a pot of water I won’t get

it, so who’ll give me a cot? A cot isn’t like the things we’ve got—cow dung fuel or chaff or wood that anybody who wants can pick up and carry off. You’d better wash your own cot and set it out—in this hot weather it ought to be dry by the time he comes.’ ‘He won’t sit on our cot’, Jhuriya said. ‘You know what a stickler he is about religion and doing things according to the rule.’ A little worried, Dukhi said, ‘Yes, that’s true. I’ll break off some mohwa leaves and make a mat for him, that will be the thing. Great gentlemen eat off mohwa leaves, they’re holy. Hand me my stick and I’ll break some off’. ‘I’ll make the mat, you go to him. But we’ll have to offer him some food he can take home and cook, won’t we? I’ll put it in my dish—’ ‘Don’t commit any such sacrilege!’ Dukhi said. ‘If you do, the offering will be wasted and the dish broken. Baba will just pick up the dish and dump it. He flies off of the handle very fast, and when he’s in a rage he doesn’t even spare his wife, and he beat his son so badly that even now he goes around with a broken hand. So we’ll put the offering on a leaf too. Just don’t touch it. Take Jhuri the Gond’s daughter to the village merchant and bring back all the things we need. Let it be a complete offering—a full two pounds of flour, a half of rice, a quarter of gram, an eighth of ghee, salt, turmeric, and four annas at the edge of the leaf. If you don’t find the Gond girl then get the woman who runs the parching oven, beg her to go if you have to. Just don’t touch anything because that will be a great wrong.’ After these instructions Dukhi picked up his stick, took a big bundle of grass and went to make his request to the Pandit. He couldn’t go empty-handed to ask a favour of the Pandit; he had nothing except the grass for a present. If Panditji ever saw him coming without an offering, he’d shout abuse at him from far away. Pandit Ghasiram was completely devoted to God. As soon as he awoke he would busy himself with his rituals. After washing his hands and feet at eight o’ clock, he would begin the real ceremony of worship, the first part of which consisted of the preparation of bhang. After that he would grind sandalwood paste for half-an-hour, then with a straw he would apply it to his forehead before the mirror. Between two lines of sandalwood paste he would draw a red dot. Then on his chest and arms he would draw designs of perfect circles. After this he would take out the image of the Lord, bathe it, apply the sandalwood to it, deck it with flowers, perform the ceremony of lighting the lamp before it and ringing a little bell. At ten o’clock he’d rise from his devotions and after a drink of the bhang go outside where a few clients would have gathered: such was the reward for his piety; this was his crop to harvest. Today when he came from the shrine in his house he saw Dukhi the Untouchable tanner sitting there with a bundle of grass. As soon as he caught sight of him Dukhi stood up, prostrated himself on the ground, stood up again and folded his hands. Seeing the Pandit’s glorious figure his heart was filled with reverence. How godly a sight!—a rather short, roly-poly fellow with a bald, shiny skull, chubby cheeks and eyes aglow with brahmanical energy. The sandalwood markings bestowed on him the aspect of the gods. At the sight of Dukhi he intoned, ‘What brings you here today, little Dukhi?’ Bowing his head, Dukhi said, ‘I’m arranging Bitiya’s betrothal. Will your worship help us to fix an auspicious date? When can you find the time?’ ‘I have no time today,’ Pandit said. ‘But still, I’ll manage to come toward evening.’ ‘No, maharaj, please come soon. I’ve arranged everything for you. Where shall I set this grass down?’

‘Put it down in front of the cow and if you’ll just pick up that broom sweep it clean in front of the door,’ Panditji said. ‘Then the floor of the sitting room hasn’t been plastered for several days so plaster it with cowdung. While you’re doing that I’ll be having my lunch, then I’ll rest a bit and after that I’ll come. Oh yes, you can split that wood too, and in the storeroom there’s a little pile of hay—just take it out and put it into the fodder bin.’ Dukhi began at once to carry out the orders. He swept the door-step, he plastered the floor. This took until noon. Panditji went off to have his lunch. Dukhi, who had eaten nothing since morning, was terribly hungry. But there was no way he could eat here. His house was a mile away—if he went to eat there Panditji would be angry. The poor fellow suppressed his hunger and began to split the wood. It was fairly thick tree trunk on which a great many devotees had previously tried their strength and it was ready to match iron with iron in any fight. Dukhi, who was used to cutting grass and bringing it to the market, had no experience with cutting wood. The grass would bow its head before his sickle but now even when he bought the axe down with all its strength it didn’t make a mark on the trunk. The axe just glanced off. He was drenched in sweat, panting, he sat down exhausted and got up again. He could scarcely lift his hands, his legs were unsteady, he saw spots, he felt dizzy, but still he went on trying. He thought that if he could get a pipeful of tobacco to smoke then perhaps he might feel refreshed. This was a Brahman village, and Brahmans didn’t smoke tobacco at all like the low castes and Untouchables. Suddenly he remembered that there was a Gond living in the village too, surely he would have a pipeful. He set off at a run for the man’s house at once, and he was in luck. The Gond gave him both pipe and tobacco, but he had no fire to light it with. Dukhi said, ‘Don’t wor ry about the fire, brother, I’ll go to Panditji’s house and ask him for a light, they’re still cooking there.’ With this he took the pipe and came back and stood on the verandah of the Brahman’s house, and he said, ‘Master, if I could get just a little bit of light I’ll smoke this pipeful.’ Panditji was eating and his wife said, ‘Who’s that man asking for a light?’ ‘It’s only that damned litle Dukhi the tanner. I told him to cut some wood. The fire’s lit, so go give him his light.’ Frowning, the Panditayin said, ‘You’ve become so wrapped up in your books and astrological charts that you’ve forgotten all about caste rules. If there’s tanner or a washerman or a birdcatcher why he can just come walking right into the house as though he owned it. You’d think it was an inn and not a decent Hindu’s house. Tell that good-for nothing to get out or I’ll scorch his face with a firebrand.’ Trying to calm her down, Panditji said, ‘He’s come inside—so what? Nothing that belongs to you has been stolen. The floor is clean, it hasn’t been desecrated. Why not just let him have his light— he’s doing our work, isn’t he? You’d have to pay at least four annas if you hired some labourer to split it.’ Losing her temper, the Panditayin said, ‘What does he mean coming into this house!’ ‘It was the son of a bitch’s bad luck, what else?’ the Pandit said. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘This time I’ll give him his fire but if he ever comes into the house again like that I’ll give him the coals in his face.’ Fragments of this conversation reached Dukhi’s ears. He repented: it was a mistake to come. She was speaking the truth—how could a tanner ever come into a Brahman’s house? These people were clean and holy, that was why the whole world worshipped and respected them. A mere tanner was absolutely nothing. He had lived all his life in the village without understanding this before.

Therefore when the Pandit’s wife came out bringing coals it was like a miracle from heaven. Folding his hands and touching his forehead to the ground he said, ‘Panditayin, Mother, it was very wrong of me to come inside your house. Tanners don’t have much sense—if we weren’t fools why would we get kicked so much?’ The had brought the coals in pair of tongs. From a few feet away, with her veil drawn over her face, she flung the coals toward Dukhi. Big sparks fell on his head and drawing back hastily he shook them out of his hair. To himself he said, ‘This is what comes of dirtying a clean Brahman’s house. How quickly God pays you back for it! That is why everybody’s afraid of Pandits. Everybody else gives up his money and never gets it back but who ever got any money out of a Brahman? Anybody who tried would have his whole family destroyed and his legs would turn leprous.’ He went outside and smoked his pipe, then took up axe and started to work again. Because the sparks had fallen on him the Pandit’s wife felt some pity for him. When the Pandit got up from his meal she said to him, ‘Give this tanner something to eat, the poor fellow’s been working for a long time, he must be hungry.’ Panditji considered this proposal entirely outside of the behaviour expected of him. He asked, ‘Is there any bread?’ ‘There are a couple of pieces left over.’ ‘What’s the good of two or three pieces for a tanner? Those people need at least a good two pounds.’ His wife put her hands over her ears. ‘My, my, a good two pounds! Then let’s forget about it.’ Majestically Panditji said, ‘If there’s some bran and husks mix them in flour and make a couple of pancakes. That’ll fill the bastard’s belly up. You can never fill up these low-caste people with good bread. Plain millet is what they need.’ ‘Let’s forget the whole thing,’ the Panditayin said, ‘I’m not going to kill myself cooking in weather like this.’ When he took up the axe again after smoking his pipe, Dukhi found that with his rest the strength had to some extent come back into his arms. He swung the axe for about half an hour, then out of breath he sat down right there with his head in his hands. In the meantime the Gond came. He said, ‘Why are you wearing yourself out, old friend? You can whack it all you like but you won’t split this trunk. You’re killing yourself for nothing.’ ‘Have you had anything to eat? Or are they just making you work without feeding you? Why don’t you ask them for something?’ ‘How can you expect me to digest a Brahman’s food, Chikhuri?’ ‘Digesting it is no problem, you have to get it first. He sits in there and eats like a king and then has a nice little nap after he tells you you have to split his wood. The government officials may force you to work for them but they pay you something for it, no matter how little. This fellow’s gone one better, calling himself a holy man.’ ‘Speak softly, brother, if they hear you we’ll be in trouble.’

With that Dukhi went back to work and began to swing the axe. Chikhuri felt so sorry for him that he came and took the axe out of Dukhi’s hands and worked with it for a good half hour. But there was not even a crack in the wood. Then he threw the axe down and said, ‘Whack it all you like but you won’t split it, you’re just killing yourself,’ and he went away. Dukhi began to think, ‘Where did the Baba get hold of this trunk that can’t be split? There’s not even a crack in it so far. How long can I keep smashing into it? I’ve got a hundred things to do at home by now. In a house like mine there’s no end to the work, something always left over. But he doesn’t worry about that. I’ll just bring him his hay and tell him, ‘Baba, the wood didn’t split. I’ll come and finish it tomorrow.’ He lifted up the basket and began to bring the hay. From the storeroom to the fodder bin was no less than a quarter of a mile. If he’d really filled up the basket the work would have been quickly finished, but then who could have hoisted up the basket on his head? He couldn’t raise a fully loaded basket, so he took just a little each time. It was four o’clock by the time he’d finished with the hay. At this time Pandit Ghasiram woke up, washed his hands and face, took some paan and came outside. He saw Dukhi asleep with the basket still on his head. He shouted, ‘Arrey, Dukhiya, sleeping. The wood’s lying there just the way it was. What’s taken you so long? You’ve used up the whole day just to bring in a little fistful of hay and then gone and fallen asleep! Pick up the axe and split the wood. You haven’t even made a dent in it. So if you don’t find an auspicious day for your daughter’s marriage, don’t blame me. This is why they say that as soon as an Untouchable gets a little food in his house he can’t be bothered with you any more.’ Dukhi picked up the axe again. He completely forgot what he had been thinking about before. His stomach was pasted again his backbone—he hadn’t so much as eaten breakfast that morning; there wasn’t any time. Just to stand up seemed an impossible task. His spirit flagged, but only for a moment. This was the Pandit, if he didn’t fix an auspicious day the marriage would be a total failure. And that was why everybody respected the Pandits—everything depended on getting the right day set. He could ruin anybody he wanted to. Panditji came close to the log and standing there began to goad him. ‘That’s right, give it a real hard stroke, a real hard one. Come on now, really hit it! Don’t you have any strength in your arm? Smash it, what’s the point of standing these thinking about it? That’s it, it’s going to split, there’s a crack in it.’ Dukhi was in a delirium some; kind of hidden power seemed to have come into his hands. It was as though fatigue, hunger, weakness, all had left him. He was astonished at his own strength. The axe-strokes descended one after another like lightning. He went on driving the axe in this state of intoxication until finally the log split down the middle. And Dukhi’s hands let the axe drop. At the same moment overcome with dizziness, he fell, the hungry, thirsty, exhausted body gave up. Panditji called, ‘Get up, just two or three more strokes. I want it in small bits.’ Dukhi did not get up. It didn’t seem proper to Pandit Ghasiram to insist now. He went inside drank some bhang, emptied his bowels, bathed and came forth attired in full Pandit regalia. Dukhi was still lying on the ground. Panditji shouted, ‘Well, Dukhi are you going to just stay lying here? Let’s go, I’m on my way to your house! Everything’s set it?’ But still Dukhi did not get up. A little alarmed, Panditji drew closer and saw that Dukhi was absolutely stiff. Startled half out of his wits he ran into the house and said to his wife, ‘Little Dukhi looks as though he’s dead.’ Thrown into confusion Panditayin said, ‘But hasn’t he just been chopping wood?’ ‘He died right while he was splitting it. What’s going to happen?’ Calmer, the Panditayan said,’ ‘What do you mean what’s going to happen? Send word to the tanners settlement so they can come and take the corpse away.’ In a moment the whole village knew about it. It happened that except for the Gond house everyone who lived there was Brahman. People stayed off the road that went there. The only path

to the well passed that way—how were they to get water? Who would come to draw water with a tanner’s corpse nearby? One old woman said to Panditji, ‘Why don’t you have this body thrown away? Is anybody in the village going to be able to drink water or not?’ The Gond went from the village to the tanners’ settlement and told everyone the story. ‘Careful now!’ he said. ‘Don’t go to get the body. There’ll be a police investigation yet. It’s no joke that somebody killed this poor fellow. The somebody may be a pandit, but just in his own house. If you move the body you’ll get arrested too.’ Right after this Panditji arrived. But there was nobody in the settlement ready to carry the corpse away. To be sure, Dukhi’s wife and daughter both went moaning to Panditji’s door and tore their hair and wept. About a dozen other women went with them, but there was no man with them to bear up the body. Panditji threatened the tanners, he tried to wheedle them, but they were very mindful of the police and not one of them stirred. Finally Panditji went home disappointed. At midnight the weeping and lamentation were still going on. It was hard for the Brahmans to fall asleep. But no tanner came to get the corpse, and how could a Brahman lift up an Untouchable’s body? It was expressly forbidden in the scriptures and no one could deny it. Angrily the Panditayin said, ‘Those witches are driving me out of my mind. And they’re not even hoarse yet!’ ‘Let the hags cry as long as they want. When he was alive nobody cared a straw about him. Now that he’s dead everybody in the village is making a fuss about him.’ ‘The wailing of tanners is bad luck,’ the Panditayin said. ‘Yes, very bad luck.’ ‘And it’s beginning to stink already.’ ‘Wasn’t that bastard a tanner? Those people eat anything, clean or not, without worrying about it.’ ‘No sort of food disgusts them!’ ‘They’re all polluted!’ Somehow or other they got through the night. But even in the morning no tanner came. They could still hear the wailing of the women. The stench was beginning to spread quite a bit. Panditji got out a rope. He made a noose and managed to get it over the dead man’s feet and drew it tight. Morning mist still clouded the air. Panditji grabbed the rope and began to drag it, and he dragged it until it was out the village. When he got back home he bathed immediately, read out prayers to Durga for purification and sprinkled Ganges water around the house. Out there in the field the jackals and kites, dogs and crows were picking at Dukhi’s body. This was the reward of a whole life of devotion, service and faith.

NOTES Deliverance, sadgati in Hindi, has the sense of a death in a state of grace. The devastating irony of the Hindi word, in which the ‘sat’ (the first half of the word) means good, is difficult to convey in translation. The word literally means a ‘good death’ and conveys the idea of salvation achieved in death.

Dukhi. The name means ‘sorrowful’. Such names are often given in villages to avert the evil eye and keep the owner from misfortune. Dukhi comes from the untouchable community of Chamars whose task is to work with skins and hides and to remove dead animals. Gond: The Gonds are mostly a settled agricultural tribe and one of the largest, concentrated in Orissa, Andhra, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Chikuri is a Gond. The story is set in an area where there seems to be substantial contact between tribes and castes. Chikuri’s attempts to help Dukhi show how in such areas tribes and lower caste communities have lived in a symbiotic relationship. Implicit in Dukhi’s subservience to and Chikuri’s relative freedom from the Pandit is the difference between tribes and castes; tribes tend to be egalitarian whereas castes are intrinsically hierarchical. However, the relationship between castes and tribes is more complex. Tribal beliefs and practices have altered in the face of contact with Hindus and missionaries. As one study points out, ‘tribal society is not always more egalitarian than the rest of the rural populace; some of the larger tribes, such as the Gonds, are highly stratified.’ Moreover, tribal people, too, often end up doing unpaid work due to economic pressures. Bhang: narcotic drink made from hemp leaves.

QUESTIONS 1.

What does the name Dukhi suggest?

2.

What contribution does the first scene—where Dukhi and his wife plan how to receive the Pandit— make to the whole story?

3.

‘How godly a sight!’ Dukhi thinks when he sees the Brahmin. How does Premchand ensure that the reader does not share this view?

4.

Find more examples in the story of this kind of irony, i.e. where there is a discrepancy between our view of events and Dukhi’s. Examine how Premchand uses both authorial comment and passages of ‘objective’ description to influence the reader’s reaction to the Pandit.

5.

How skilled do you find Premchand at revealing character through dialogue?

6.

Does this story bear out the truth of Jotirao Phule’s claim that Sudras are mentally enslaved?

7.

Contrast the characters of Dukhi and Chikhuri.

8.

What aspects of Brahmin life and attitudes are satirised in (a) the Pandit and (b) the Pandit’s wife?

9.

What is ironic about the way the story ends?

_______________ From The World of Premchand: Selected Stories Premchand. Translated by David Rubin. London: Allen & Unwin, 1969. Rpt. Oxford University Press, Delhi.

3 Joothan Omprakash Valmiki Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is an autobiographical account of his experience of growing up in a village near Muzzafarnagar in UP as an untouchable or Dalit in the newly independent India of the 1950s. An engineer by profession, Valmiki began writing this memoir in 1974. Apart from Joothan, he has to his credit two anthologies of short stories, Salam and Guspathiyeand three anthologies of poetry, Sadiyon Ka Santaap (1989), Bas Ab Bahut Ho Chuka (1997) and Ab Aur Nahin (2003). Now a middle class intellectual, he deliberately uses the name Valmiki as a mark of identification with his roots and also with the larger community of the sweeper caste (variously called Bhangi, Chura, Chuhra in different regions of the north), many of whom call themselves Valmiki, tracing their lineage to the author of the Ramayana. Joothan is among the first texts in Hindi that identifies itself as a part of Dalit literature. Until the advent of Dalit literature in Marathi in the 1950s and its subsequent spread to other languages such as Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati and Punjabi in the modern period, literature had been the domain of the high castes. Dalit literary expression has shown a dramatic increase throughout the Hindi belt since the late 1980s. Joothan elucidates the powerful narrative agenda of Dalit autobiography which contests the claim that discrimination on the basis of caste no longer operates as a social force in modern India. The passage is an extract from Joothan: A Dalit’s Life (1997). Our house was adjacent to Chandrabhan Taga’s gher or cowshed. Next to it lived the families of Muslim weavers. Right in front of Chandrabhan Taga’s gher was a little johri, a pond, which had created a sort of partition between the Chuhras’ dwellings and the village. The name of the johri was Dabbowali. It is hard to say how it got the name of Dabbowali. Perhaps because its shape was that of a big pit. On one side of the pit were the high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. At a right angle to these were the clay walls of the two or three homes of the Jhinwars. After these there were more homes of the Tagas. On the edges of the pond were the homes of the Chuhras. All the women of the village, young girls, older women, even newly-married brides, would sit in the open space behind these homes at the edges of the pond to take a shit. Not just under the cover of darkness but even in daylight. The purdah-observing Tyagi women, their faces covered with their saris, shawls around their shoulders, found relief in this open-air latrine. They sat on Dabbowali’s shores without worrying about decency, exposing their private parts. All the quarrels of the village would be discussed in the shape of a Round Table conference at this same spot. There was muck strewn everywhere. The stench was so overpowering that one would choke within a minute. The pigs wandering in narrow lanes, naked children, dogs, daily fights, this was the environment of my childhood. If the people who call the caste system an ideal social arrangement had to live in this environment for a day or two, they would change their mind. Our family lived in this Chuhra basti. Five brothers, one sister, two chachas, one tau and his family. Chachas and tau lived separately. Everyone in the family did some or other work. Even then we didn’t manage to get two decent meals a day. We did all sorts of work for the Tagas, including cleaning, agricultural work and general labour. We would often have to work without pay. Nobody dared to refuse this unpaid work for which we got neither money nor grain. Instead, we got sworn at and abused. They did not call us by our names. If the person were older, then he

would be called ‘Oe Chuhre’. If the person were younger or of the same age, then ‘Abey Chuhre’ was used. Untouchability was so rampant that while it was considered all right to touch dogs and cats or cows and buffaloes, if one happened to touch a Chuhra, one got contaminated or polluted. The Chuhras were not seen as human. They were simply things for use. Their utility lasted until the work was done. Use them and then throw them away. A Christian used to visit our neighbourhood. His name was Sewak Ram Masihi. He would sit with the children of the Chuhras around him. He used to teach them reading and writing. The government schools did not allow these children to enrol. My family sent only myself to Sewak Ram Masihi. My brothers were all working. There was no question of sending our sister to school. I learnt my alphabet in master Sewak Ram Masihi’s open-air school, a school without mats or rooms. One day, Sewak Ram Masihi and my father had an argument. My father took me to the Basic Primary School. There my father begged master Har Phool Singh; ‘Masterji, I will be forever in your debt if you teach this child of mine a letter or two.’ Master Har Phool Singh asked us to come the next day. My father went. He kept going for several days. Finally, one day I was admitted to the school. The country had become independent eight years ago. Gandhiji’s uplifting of the Untouchables was resounding everywhere. Although the doors of the government schools had begun to open for Untouchables, the mentality of the ordinary people had not changed much. I had to sit away from the others in the class, that too on the floor. The mat ran out before reaching the spot I sat on. Sometimes I would have to sit way behind everybody, right near the door. And the letters on the board from there seemed faded. The children of the Tyagis would tease me by calling me ‘Chuhre ka’. Sometimes they would beat me without any reason. This was an absurd tormented life that made me introverted and irritable. If I got thirsty in school, then I had to stand near the hand-pump. The boys would beat me in any case, but the teachers also punished me. All sorts of stratagems were tried so that I would run away from the school and take up the kind of work for which I was born. According to these perpetrators, my attempts to get schooling were unwarranted. Ram Singh and Sukkhan Singh were also in my class. Ram Singh was a Chamar and Sukkhan Singh was a Jhinwar. Ram Singh’s father and mother worked as agricultural labourers. Sukkhan Singh’s father was a peon in the Inter College. The three of us studied together, grew up together, experienced the sweat and sour moments of childhood together. All three of us were very good in our studies but our lower-caste background dogged us at every step. Barla Village also had some Muslim Tyagis who were called Tagas as well. The behaviour of these Muslim Tagas was just like that of the Hindu Tagas. If we ever went out wearing neat and clean clothes, we had to hear their taunts that pierced deep inside like poisoned arrows. If we went to the school in neat and clean clothes, then our class fellows said, ‘Abey, Chuhre ka, he has come dressed in new clothes.’ If one went wearing old and shabby clothes, then they said, ‘Abey, Chuhre ke, get away from me, you stink.’ This was our no-win situation. We were humiliated whichever way we dressed. I reached fourth class. Headmaster Bishambar Singh had been replaced by Kaliram. Along with him had come another new teacher. After the arrival of these two, the three of us fell on terrible times. We would be thrashed at the slightest excuse. Ram Singh would escape once in while, but Sukkhan Singh and I got beaten almost daily. I was very weak and skinny those days. Sukkhan Singh had developed a boil on his belly, just below his ribs. While in class, he used to keep his shirt folded up so as to keep the boil uncovered. This way the shirt could be kept clear of the puss on the one hand, and on the other, the boil protected from the blows of the teacher. One day while thrashing Sukkhan Singh, the teacher’s fist hit the boil. Sukkhan screamed with pain.

The boil had burst. Seeing him flailing with pain, I too began to cry. While we cried, the teacher was showering abuse on us nonstop. If I repeated his abusive words here, they would smear the nobility of Hindi. I say that because many big-named Hindi writers had wrinkled their nose and eyebrows when I had a character in my short story ‘Bail Ki Khal’ (The Ox Hide) swear. Coincidentally, the character who swore was a Brahman, that is, the knower of Brahma, of God. Was it possible? Would a Brahman swear….? The ideal image of the teachers that I saw in my childhood has remained indelibly imprinted on my memory. Whenever someone starts taking about a great guru, I remember all those teachers who used to swear about mothers and sisters. They used to fondle good-looking boys and invited them to their homes and sexually abused them. One day the headmaster Kaliram called me to his room and asked: ‘Abey, what is your name?’ ‘Omprakash,’ I answered slowly and fearfully. Children used to feel scared just encountering the headmaster. The entire school was terrified of him. ‘Chuhre ka?’ Headmaster threw his second question at me.‘ ‘Ji.’ ‘All right… See that teak tree there? Go. Climb that tree. Break some twigs and make a broom. And sweep the whole school clean as mirror. It is after all, your family occupation. Go… get to it.’ Obeying Headmaster’s orders, I cleaned all the rooms and the verandahs. Just as I was about to finish, he came to me and said, ‘After you have swept the rooms, go and sweep the playground.’ The playground was way larger than my small physique could handle and in cleaning it my back began to ache. My face was covered with dust. Dust had gone inside my mouth. The other children in my class were studying and I was sweeping. Headmaster was sitting in his room and watching me. I was not even allowed to get a drink of water. I swept the whole day. I had never done so much work, being the pampered one among my brothers. The second day, as soon as I reached school, Headmaster again put me to sweeping the school. I swept the whole day. I was consoling myself that I will go back to the class from tomorrow. The third day I went to the class and sat down quietly. After a few minutes the headmaster’s loud thundering was heard: ‘Abey Chuhre ke, motherfucker, where are you hiding… your mother…’ I had begun to shake uncontrollably. A Tyagi boy shouted, ‘Master Saheb, there he is, sitting in the corner.’ The headmaster had pounced on my neck. The pressure of his fingers was increasing. As a wolf grabs a lamb by the neck, he dragged me out of the class and threw me on the ground. He screamed: ‘Go sweep the whole playground… Otherwise I will shove chillies up your arse and throw you out of the school.’ Frightened, I picked up the three-day-old-broom. Just like me, it was shedding its dried up leaves. All that remained were the thin sticks. Tears were falling from my eyes. I started to sweep the compound while my tears fell. From the doors and windows of the schoolrooms, the eyes of the teachers and the boys saw this spectacle. Each pore of my body was submerged in an abyss of anguish.

Just then my father passed by the school. He stopped abruptly when he saw me sweeping the school compound. He called me, ‘Munshiji, what are you doing?’ Munshiji was the pet name my father had given me. When I saw him, I burst out sobbing. He entered the school compound and came towards me. Seeing me crying, he asked, ‘Munshiji, why are you crying? Tell me, what has happened?’ I was hiccuping by now. In between my hiccups, I told the whole story to my father: that the teacher had been making me sweep for last three days; that they did not let me enter the classroom at all. Pitaji snatched the broom from my hand and threw it away. His eyes were blazing. Pitaji who was always taut as a bowstring in front of others was so angry that his dense moustache was fluttering. He began to scream, ‘Who is that teacher, that progeny of Dronacharya, who forces my son to sweep?’ Pitaji’s voice had echoed through the whole school. All the teachers, also with the headmaster came out. Kaliram, the headmaster threatened my father and called him names. But his threats had no effect on Pitaji. I have never forgotten the courage and fortitude with which my father confronted the headmaster that day. Pitaji had all sorts of weaknesses, but the decisive turn that he gave my future that day has had a great impact on my personality. The headmaster had roared, ‘Take him away from here… The Chuhra wants him educated… Go, go… Otherwise I will have your bones broken.’ Pitaji took my hand and started walking towards our home. As he walked away, he said, loudly enough for the headmaster to hear, ‘You are a teacher… So I am leaving now. But remember this much, Master… This Chuhre ka will study right here… In this school. And not just him, but there will be more coming after him.’ Pitaji had faith that the Tyagis of the village would chastize master Kaliram for his behaviour. But what happened was the exact opposite. Whosesoever’s door we knocked, the answer was, ‘What is the point of sending him to school?’ ‘When has a crow become a swan?’ ‘You illiterate boorish people, what do you know? Knowledge is not gained like this.’ ‘Hey, if he asked a Chuhra’s progeny to sweep, what is the big deal in that?’ ‘He only got him to sweep; did not ask for his thumb in the gurudakshina like Dronacharya.’ And so forth. Pitaji came back, tired and dejected. He sat up all night without food or drink. God knows how deep an anguish Pitaji went through. As soon as the morning broke, he took me along and went to the house of the pradhan, Sagwa Singh Tyagi. As soon as the pradhan saw Pitaji, he said, ‘Abey, Chotan? … what is the matter? You have come so early in the morning.’ ‘Chowdhri Saheb, you say that the government has opened the doors of the schools for the children of Chuhras and Chamars. And that headmaster makes this child of mine come out of the class and sweep all day instead of teaching him. If he has to sweep the school all day, then you tell me when is he going to study?’

Pitaji was supplicating the pradhan. He had tears in his eyes. I was standing near him and looking at him. The pradhan called me near him and asked, ‘Which class are you in?’ ‘Ji, the fourth.’ ‘You are in my Mahendra’s class?’ ‘Ji.’ Pradhanji said to Pitaji, ‘Don’t worry. Send him to school tomorrow.’ The next day I went to school with fear stalking my heart. I sat in the class in trepidation. Every second I worried that the headmaster was coming … Now he comes … At the slightest sound my heart pounded. After a few days, things calmed down. But my heart trembled the moment I saw Headmaster Kaliram. It seemed as though it wasn’t a teacher who was coming towards me but a snorting wild boar with his snout up in the air.

NOTES Valmiki: The author of Valmiki Ramayana; supposedly a criminal before his transformation into a sage. His name is derived from the Sanskrit word for ant-hill (valmika) which covered him during his long penance. Joothan: Scraps of food left over after a meal. The title underlines the poverty, pain and humiliation of Valmiki’s community which had to rely on joothan. The author later gives a detailed description of collecting and eating preserved joothan. Tyagi or Taga: This is the name of an upper caste in the western region of Uttar Pradesh where Omprakash Valmiki grew up. One of the peculiar features of caste is that it is found among nonHindus as well. The reference to the Muslim Tagas or Tyagis is to be understood in this context. The isolation of the Dalits is foregrounded in terms of their experience of caste as a factor that unites the Tyagis, both Muslims and Hindus, to perpetuate the most debilitating discrimination against them. Chuhra, Chamar, Jhinwar: Lower-caste communities. Munshiji: A munshi is a secretary or language teacher. Progeny of Dronacharya: Dronacharya was the guru of the Pandavas and instructed Arjun in the art of warfare. When a tribal boy Eklavya came to Dronacharya and asked to be taught archery, Dronacharya refused, saying he would instruct only Brahmins and Kshatriyas. However Eklavya made an effigy of Dronacharya and, treating it as his teacher, practised archery in front of it till he became proficient. When the Pandavas found out his skill and asked him who his guru was, Eklavya answered ‘Dronacharya.’ Dronacharya heard of this, called Eklavya and asked for his right thumb as gurudakshina, the gift from pupil to teacher. Eklavya gave it without hesitation and thereafter trained himself to manage the bow using his left thumb, as certain tribals in India do to this day.

QUESTIONS 1.

The writer gives extensive details describing the village pond and its environment. How do these affect the way the reader responds to the story of the later incidents in the school?

2.

In what ways does this account show that ‘the mentality of ordinary people had not changed much’?

3.

How do the schoolteachers fall short of the ideal image of the guru?

4.

A child often views the adults around him as role models for his own behaviour. Did the young Valmiki have any role models he could respect, or not?

5.

What ‘decisive turn’ did Valmiki’s father give to the boy’s future?

6.

Joothan ‘transforms an experience of pain into a narrative of resistance.’ Discuss.

7.

Why does Omprakash Valmiki use ‘abusive words’ in his writing? How does this challenge established norms of writing and middle class norms of linguistic decency?

8.

Some writers attempt to win sympathy for the oppressed castes by highlighting their meekness and innocence. Others write in a more angry style or show their characters’ rebellious rage. Which approach do you find more effective? Answer with reference to writers in this section.

_______________ From Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, Omprakash Valmiki. Translated from Hindi by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Kolkata: Samya, 2003

4 Kallu Ismat Chughtai Ismat Chughtai (1915–91) was a born rebel. She led an unconventional life, went in for higher education, took up a job, lived alone, married a man of her choice and was cremated, as she had desired, instead of being buried. After Rasheed Jahan, she was the first Muslim woman to write novels and short stories in Urdu. Rasheed Jahan was Chughtai’s mentor. In 1932, Rasheed Jahan, along with Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Ali and Mahmuduzzafar published a collection of short stories, Angaray (Embers) that set off a storm of protest in the local press. The maulvis issued fatwahs and the book was banned by the United Provinces government. In the wake of the agitation against Angaray, Sajjad Zaheer took up residence in London in March 1933. The ‘Defence of Angaray’ was published soon afterwards (in April 1933) by the Angaray group in which they announced the formation of the League of Progressive Authors. The first manifesto of the progressive writers’movement was drafted by Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer in London and the movement formally launched as the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) at a conference held in 1936 in Lucknow, under the presidentship of the Hindi-Urdu writer Premchand. The League of Progressive Authors now came under the banner of the AIPWA. Soon the movement spread and literary figures from other Indian languages (Uma Shankar Joshi, Tarashankar Bannerjee, K.Shivrama Karanth, Sumitranandan Pant, Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’) began to be associated with it. The Progressive Writers’; Movement encouraged a lot of new talents; Chughtai was one of them. Chughtai wrote many stories before she was actually published in 1939. With a keen eye and an incisive intelligence she looked into the lives of a whole range of Muslim women from the middle class in the suburban towns of Uttar Pradesh. Her stories were often controversial. ‘Lihaaf’ (1942) which deals with the issue of women’s sexual desire was charged with obscenity. It led to a trial that lasted four years at the end of which she was finally acquitted. Ismat Chughtai was an important figure of the 1940s literary scene. She also wrote for films and much later, even acted in one-- she played the role of the grandmother in Junoon (1978). Having married Shaheed Latif, the film-producer remembered for Ziddi (1948), Dev Anand’s first film to win immense popularity, Chughtai was involved with this and many of his other films like Arzoo(1950), Darwaza (1954), Society (1955) and Sone Ki Chidiya (1958). Several of her stories have been made into films. Of these, Garam Hawa(1973) won a great deal of acclaim. She is, therefore, also a part of the complex relationship that existed between Indian cinema and the progressive writers in Urdu: many of the younger writers of the time—Manto, Sardar Ali Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri—wrote for films. In 1975, she received the Padma Shri for her contribution to Urdu Literature. Although not quite seven, Kallu did the work of grown man. He was shaken out of his sleep early in the morning and, dressed only in an old, tattered shirt in winter with Abba’s old woollen cap pulled down over his ears, looking like a midget, dripping at the nose, he promptly set to work. Scared off by the cold water, he was always reluctant to wash his face, and just once in a while he would carelessly rub the tips of his fingers over his teeth which remained permanently coated with a thin film of mildew. The first thing he did in the morning was to get the stove going. Then he put water on for tea, set the table for breakfast and made a hundred rounds to the door and back carrying butter, bread,

then milk and, finally, the eggs—flapping his slippers noisily, he travelled to the kitchen innumerable times. And after the cook had prepared breakfast, Kallu made more trips to the table lugging hot toast and parathas. To ensure their good health, the children (nearly all of whom were Kallu’s age), were forcibly fed porridge, milk, eggs, toast and jam while Kallu quietly looked on. When breakfast was over he sat alone in the kitchen and ate left-over burnt ends of toast and paratha, hurriedly downing them with some tea. His next task involved taking care of small errands around the house: he polished Maliha bi’s pumps, scouted for Hamida bi’s ribbons, located Akhtar Bhai’s socks, recovered Salima bi’s book-bag, fetched Mumani Jan’s kathafrom the almirah, and retrieved Abu’s cigarette case from beside his pillow. In short, he spun around like a top until everyone had left for either the office or school. Later, he washed Nanhi’s dirty diapers, and then settled down to play with Safia bi; in between he made trips to the front door to receive mail from the mailman or to inquire the name of a visitor at the door. Around midday the cook handed him peas to shell or spinach to rinse. At lunch time he repeatedly dashed to the dining table with hot rotis, giving the baby’s cradle a little push every now and then on the way. What more can I say? He came to this household at a very young age, did the work of a bearer and sweeper, and all this for two rupees a month along with some old, ragged cast-offs. His mother lived in the village and had entrusted him to our care; he would at least have enough to eat, she thought. She herself worked as a cook for the village zamindar. She visited him sometimes usually at the Teej festival, and brought him molasses and parched wheat or fried corn. She too put him to work. ‘Dear boy, come here and scratch my back.’ ‘Son, bring me some water.’ ‘Get some roti from the kitchen, son. And ask the cook for a little dal as well.’ ‘Rub down my back boy.’ ‘Rub my shoulders.’ ‘Massage my head.’ The truth was, his little hands executed a great foot massage, and once he started you didn’t want him to stop; often he would have to continue massaging the entire afternoon. Sometimes he dozed off and fell on your legs. A kick was generally enough to awaken him. Kallu had no time to play. If, for some reason, he had a little respite between errands, he would be found slumped with exhaustion, silently staring into space like an idiot. Seeing him sitting like this, looking so foolish, someone or the other would stick a straw in his ear surreptiously, and startled, he would bashfully turn to a task that required his attention. Preparations for Maliha bi’s wedding were under way. There was talk of weddings all day long— who’s going to marry whom, how did so-and-so marry so-and-so, and who should marry whom. ‘Who’re you going to marry, Nanhi?’ Mumani would jokingly ask. ‘Apa,’ lisped Nanhi, sending everyone into fits of laughter. ‘Who’re you going to marry, Kallu?’ Amma asked in jest one day. Kallu revealed his yellow teeth in a shy grin. When he was pressed for an answer he lowered his eyes and whispered, ‘Salima bi.’

‘May you rot in hell! You stupid fool! A curse on your face!’ Peeved by the laughter around her, Mumani proceded to box Kallu’s ears. Then one day, while he and Salima were playing, Kallu asked her, ‘Salima bi, will you marry me?’ ‘Yes … es,’ Salima nodded vigorously, her little head bobbing up and down. Mumani, sitting in the sunny part of the courtyard, combing her hair, was privy to this exchange between Kallu and her daughter. Livid with anger, she removed her sandal from her foot and smacked him one with it. A blow landed in the wrong place, Kallu’s nose began to bleed and soon blood was streaming down the side of his face. Kallu’s mother, who was visiting at the time, saw the blood and screamed that her son had been murdered. ‘Get out of my house, you hypocrite!’ Mumani yelled and ordered both mother and son out. Kallu’s mother wept and begged forgiveness, but her pleas went unheeded. The years went by swiftly. As with the servant who came after him, Kallu too was forgotten. Maliha was now a mother. Hamida bi never married. Half the family had migrated to Pakistan, the other half remained here in India. Nanhi, Safia and Salima, having completed their education, were now waiting to get married. But husbands were difficult to come by. Our uncle, Chacha Mian, was constantly on the lookout for eligible young men. He moved in official circles and had arranged a match for Maliha, but he too was helpless now. These were bad times; nice young men were nearly impossible to find, and those who were around demanded that a car and fare to England be included in the dowry. Such demands could be taken into consideration only if there was one girl in the family to be wed. But here there were many. Also, the loss of land had resulted in a lowering of status and income, and there were no parties any more, no fancy get-togethers; how were young girls to meet, eligible young bachelors? Nonetheless, if a rare party did come around, Chacha Mian saw to it that the girls attended. And so when a dinner was held in honour or Mr. Din, the new Deputy Collector, preparations in our house began several days in advance. Mr. Din was a bachelor, and the eyes of all the mothers of unwed girls in the city were focused on him. We were stunned when we saw him. He was over six feet tall, had a wheatish complexion, very attractive features, and teeth which shone like real pearls. During introductions, he suddenly quietened at the mention of Salima’s name and then quickly moved away from our group to chat with the other guests. Chacha Mian approached us with an expression of bafflement on his face just as we were getting ready to leave. ‘Do you know who this Mr. Din is?’ he asked. ‘The Deputy Collector, who else’ Mumani answered gruffly., ‘No, no. I mean, did you recognize him? My dear, he’s our own Kallu.’ ‘Kallu?’ Mumani crinkled her nose. ‘Yes, yes Kallu. Kalimuddin. This is too much!’ ‘You mean that little midget who was our houseboy?’ ‘Yes, the very same, the one who suffered a beating at your hands.’ Chacha Mian guffawed.

‘My God! What’s wrong with the government? It seems just about anyone can land a job with it these days! But how did this happen?’ ‘Why not? He’s a Qureshi, that’s a good caste, and he even submitted to your beating when the need arose,’ my mother said in a mocking tone. ‘Well, in that case why don’t you give him your daughter in marriage?’ Mumani spoke archly. ‘I wish my daughters were so fortunate,’ Amma said. ‘I’d be only too happy to have him for a sonin law. But why would he want to have anything to do with a family at whose hands he suffered such humiliation? Ayesha, his mother, left him with us so he could become somebody. But you turned him into a servant.’ Chacha Mian said, ‘And the poor woman worked hard, sewed clothes, washed people’s dirty dishes and finally succeeded in raising him to such heights. People are willing to present him their daughters on a silver platter.’ ‘May they perish who do—I don’t need him,’ said Mumani sullenly. One day Chacha Mian arrived at our house in his usual state of nervous agitation. ‘We were at the club, talking, and before I knew it, Kalimauddin walked out of there with me as I was leaving. Make some tea, anything!’ Amma ran towards the kitchen, but Mumani, a grimace firmly set on her face, didn’t budge. The girls became pale; Salima was especially perturbed. We wondered whether ‘Kalim Saheb’ should be asked to come in or the ladies be sent to the lawn, or Chacha Mian be allowed to handle everything by himself. ‘He’s here for revenge,’ Maliha said with mock seriousness, and Mumani shivered. Salima’s face was drained of colour. ‘I don’t care what happens,’ Amma said, He’s here, which means he’s a decent person, and we should respond with the same sort of generosity.’ ‘No, I don’t want to be humiliated,’ Mumani growled. ‘you are welcome to take your own girls— none of mine is going to stir from here. He’s just here to show of his superiority.’ ‘I won’t go either. I’m already married,’ Maliha said with a laugh. Finally it was decided that we would all go and, of Mumani’s daughters, only Maliha would accompany us. What’s he going to think, such uncivilized people!’ Upset and bewildered, Chacha Mian started grumbling. We arrived in the lawn to find ‘Kalim Saheb’ engaged in a lively conversation about the past with the old gardener, who smiled sheepishly, somewhat embarrassed, a little uncomfortable. ‘Midu chacha, remember how you used to holler, ‘Wate…er!’ at the front door and immediately I used to pull a sheet in front of Dulhan bi3 (that’s what he called Mumani) for purdah? Tell me truthfully, did you ever sneak a look through the sheet?’ he burst into laughter, and then seeing us approach, quickly turned to greet us.

While we were having tea he said, ‘Maliha bi, do you remember how you boxed my ears for not brushing my teeth regularly?’ Maliha blushed. ‘No matter how unpleasant one’s childhood has been, one always remembers it like a wonderful dream,’ he said. ‘All of you probably forgot about me, but I didn’t forget you.’ We talked for a long time afterwards, shared jokes and laughed. His carefree manner put us at ease in no time. ‘Give my regards to Dulhan bi,’ he said before he left. ‘She’s not felling well,’ Maliha lied. He laughed, ‘Forgive me, but I have a very sharp memory. I remember that when Dulhan bi was angry with someone she took ill. Well, I have to go, I have a dinner engagement tonight. I’ll come again another time.’ We talked about ‘Kalim Saheb’ late into the night. ‘What if he proposes…’ Chacha Mian spoke with some hesitation. ‘He’d better stay away from my girls,’ Mumani retorted curtly. ‘Why?’ Amma was irritated. ‘Because I say so!’ This was all artifice on her part; only God knew what was really going on in Mumani’s heart. Salima became tearful. Everyone had been teasing her. A month passed. We had almost forgotten about ‘Kalim Saheb’ when suddenly he arrived at our house one day with Chacha Mian. This time Chacha Mian informed only Maliha and myself of his presence in the lawn. ‘He wants to see his crochety Dulhan bi,’ Chacha Mian said. ‘And she won’t let him come near her.’ We decided that since Mumani would never agree to a meeting voluntarily, the best course of action would be to just bring him in and surprise her. ‘My dears, she’s a witch! There’ll be no place to hide my face if she insults him.’ Chacha Mian spoke fearfully. ‘Don’t worry,’ Maliha said, ‘she’s not a child. I’ll go and get her and you bring him in.’ Our hearts beat uncontrollably. What if Mumani exploded like a bomb? Except for Maliha and me, all the other girls disappeared into the house. ‘Kalim Saheb’ walked into the room to find Mumani engrossed in cleaning her paan dan; her back was turned to him.

‘Maliha, listen girl, get me the bowl of katha from the cupboard in the kitchen, will you,’ she called out. He took the bowl of katha from Maliha and handed it to Mumani. She extended her a hand towards it and said, And some water, too.’ Just then she lifted her eyes and found him standing by her side. ‘Adab’. He whispered the salutation nervously and kept his eyes glued to the floor. ‘God bless you,’ she responded in a deadened tone and started spooning out katha from the bowl. ‘Are you well?’ ‘I am fine, with your blessing.’ ‘Why are you standing? Sit down,’ she ordered dryly. He sat on the far side of the charpoy, on the adwan. ‘Oh-ho! Not there, you will break the adwan!’ she yelled. He jumped up hastily. When ‘Kalim Saheb’ sent a message requesting Salima’s hand in marriage, she was unrelenting. ‘Come hell or high water, I won’t give him Salima,’ she said. ‘But why?’ Chacha Mian and the others pressed for a reason. ‘Who’re you to ask? I’ve decided I won’t and that’s that!’ she said obstinately. ‘Kalim Saheb’ said he hadn’t take no from life and he wasn’t going to take no from the old lady either. Determined to get his way, he boldly stationed himself on a chair next to Mumani’s bed one day. All of us gathered around them with great interest, as if a fight between two wrestlers in a ring was about to commence. ‘I’m going to make myself very clear’, he spoke firmly. Mumani frowned. ‘You’re turning the tables on him, Dulhan bi—that’s not fair,’ Chacha Mian interjected. ‘Don’t say anything, Chacha Mian, I’ll take care of this myself.’ ‘Kalim Saheb’ brushed Chacha Mian aside and turned to Mumani. ‘At least tell me what my crime is, Dulhan bi?’ he complained. ‘Dulhan bi! Hunh! As long as you call me Dulhan bi…’ Mumani muttered indignantly. ‘Amma bi …’ he began in a tearful voice. Mumani’s eyes also filled with tears. She began scolding us. ‘Is this a circus? Why are you standing around watching like idiots? I know these girls won’t be any help with the wedding arrangements. I’ll have to take care of everything myself, as usual. Useless, these girls are, good-for-nothing!’ Mumani’s cantankerous chastisement fell upon our ears like the sound of wedding trumpets.

NOTES Pumps: light flat shoes without fastenings. Katha: catechu, a brown paste made from the tree acacia catechu, spread on betel leaves as an ingredient of paan. Paan dan: ornamental box containing the ingredients for making paan. Adwan: the strings at the foot of a charpoy or cot, by which the cross-strings are tightened. Dulhan: Bride.

QUESTIONS 1.

Does the author give us clues enabling us to understand Mumani’s actions? Contrast the characters of the speaker’s mother ‘Amma’ and Mumani Jan, illustrating from the story.

2.

Are we given any evidence of qualities in Kallu himself or in his background that might explain his rise to the position of Deputy Collector?

3.

‘This was all artifice on her part. Only God knew what was going on in Mumani’s heart.’ Does any author give us clues enabling us to understand Mumani’s actions?

4.

What is the significance of Kallu’s calling Mumani Jan ‘Amma’ rather than ‘Dulhan bi’ at the end of the story?

5.

How far do the following factors affect the family’s decision to accept Kallu as a bridegroom?

1. 2.

their declining social and economic position a sense of guilt at their earlier treatment of Kallu 3. Kallu’s present high status

4.

the special feeling between Kallu and Salima 6.

The story proves that people’s attitudes are dictated by money. Discuss.

_______________ From The Quilt and Other Stories. Translated by Tahira Naqvi and Syeda. S. Hameed. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990.

5 Bosom Friend Hira Bansode Hira Bansode (1939–), one of the best-known woman Dalit poets in Marathi, brought a feminist slant to Dalit poetry along with others like Mallika Maarsheikh and Meena Gajbhiya. Born into a Mahar family, a Kamble, in a village of Pune district, she moved to Bombay as a child when her father became a municipal worker. She studied here up to ninth standard before being married at the age of 14–15. Encouraged by her husband and father-in-law, she completed SSC and then began working as a railway clerk, a job she still holds. It took thirteen years of endeavour for her to take the B.A and M.A. in Marathi. Hirabai’s childhood love for song found expression later in verse. Her early love songs soon gave way to poetry about the struggle for caste equality. Her poetry today aspires to give voice to the dreams, unfulfilled hopes and pain of Dalit women who are doubly oppressed ‘like a drum [of Manu] that is beaten at both ends… and continues to be so.’ Typical are the following lines from her poem ‘Yashodhara’: We were brightened by Buddha’s light,/But you absorbed the dark.’ Her tone in public can be fierce and funny, but her poetry tends to be gentle, inspired by the poets Daya Pawar, Kusumagraj, Janabai and Dhyaneshwar. Her three poetry collections, Pournima, Phiyad (1984) and Phoenix (2001) are highly acclaimed and have received several awards. Hirabai runs Samvadini, a social and cultural forum for empowering Dalit women. ‘Bosom Friend’ from her collection Phiyad(1984) reflects the experience of educated Dalit women. Society still looks down on them as of low caste while pretending to treat them as equals. Today you came over to dinner for the first time You not only came, you forgot your caste and came Usually women don’t forget that tradition of inequality But you came with a mind large as the sky to me pocket size house I thought you had ripped out all those caste things You came bridging that chasm that divides us Truly, friend I was really happy With the naive devotion of Shabari I arranged the food on your plate But the moment you looked at the plate, your face changed With a smirk you said Oh My—Do you serve chutny koshimbir this way? You still don’t know how to serve food Truly, you folk will never improve

I was ashamed, really ashamed My hand which had just touched the sky was knocked down I was silent Toward the end of the meal you asked What’s this? don’t you serve buttermilk or yoghurt with the last course of rice? Oh My Dear, we can–t do without that … The last bit of my courage fell away like a falling star I was sad, then numb But the next moment I cam back to life A stone dropped in the water stirs up things on the bottom

So my memories swam up in my mind Dear Friend—You ask about buttermilk and yoghurt What/How can I tell you?

You know, in my childhood we didn’t even have milk for tea much less yoghurt or buttermilk My mother cooked on sawdust she brought from the lumberyard wiping away the smoke from her eyes Every once in a while we might get garlic chutny on coarse bread Otherwise we just ate bread crumbled in water Dear Friend—Shrikhand was not even a word in our vocabulary My nose had never smelled the fragrance of ghee My tongue had never tasted halva, basundi Dear Friend—You have not discarded your tradition Its roots go deep in your mind And that’s true, true, true Friend—There’s yoghurt on the last course of rice Today the arrangement of food on your plate was not properly ordered Are you going to tell me what mistakes I made? Are you going to tell me my mistakes?

NOTES Naïve devotion of Shabari: Remembered for her devotion to Lord Rama in the Ramayana, the tribal woman Shabari’s devotion is seen naive in its total disregard for social convention. To ensure that the berries she offered to Lord Rama were sweet, she tasted each one of them, thus rendering them ‘jootha’. He accepted the humble offering, disregarding strictly observed caste laws on eating ‘jootha’ and inter-dining. Chutny-koshimbir: green dhania chutney.

QUESTIONS 1.

Comment on the conflict between expectation and reality with special reference to the title.

2.

Identify the specific form of inequality being referred to in the opening lines of the poem.

3.

What does the image of the sky suggest in the poem?

4.

Comment on the use of the words ‘you folk’ by the guest to address her friend.

5.

Can we generalize to say that the writers who have personally experienced oppression write differently from those who write only out of sympathy with the oppressed? Answer with reference to texts in this section.

_______________ From An Anthology Dalit Literature. Edited by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot. New Delhi: Gyan Publishers, 1992. Translated from the Marathi by Jayant Karve and Eleanor Zelliot.

6 Who Were the Shudras? B.R. Ambedkar Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) was born in Mhow, into an untouchable Mahar family. As his father and grandfather were in the British Army, the children of the family received good education: the government of the day required all Army personnel and their families to be educated. In the armies raised by the British both before and after 1857, the Mahars constituted a substantial percentage. These development opportunities in education and employment led to changes that came into conflict with traditional social relations. Ambedkar passed his high school in 1908 and after his graduation in 1912, went to study economics at the Columbia University, USA, where he was awarded a Ph.D. In 1920 he went to London; later he was called to the Bar from Gray’s Inn. The financial support extended by the Gaikwad of Baroda, made much of his education possible. On his return to India in 1923, he considered himself fully equipped to fight the evil of untouchability. He founded the Bahishkrut Hitkarini Sabha in 1924 for the emancipation of the lower castes and took the grievances of the untouchables to court. The famous Chavdar Taley (sweet-water tank) water dispute started in 1927, to establish the depressed peoples’ right to use water from the same tank as the upper caste Hindus, was finally won several years later. Ambedkar was skeptical of the Congress’ commitment to safeguard the rights of the depressed classes and demanded separate electorates for them. When this was granted, Gandhi went on a fast unto death against it. Differences between the two were finally resolved through the Poona Pact (1932) according to which the separate electorate demand was replaced with special concessions like reserved seats in the regional legislative assemblies and the Central Council of States. Ambedkar founded the Independent Labour Party of India in 1936 and the Scheduled Castes Federation in 1942, which was an all-India organization to mobilize the lower castes. He edited Marathi journals like Bahiskrit Bharat, Janata, and Samata. In addition to being a Dalit leader, he is also remembered as the chairman of the Drafting Committee, set up to draft the Constitution of India. Article 11 abolished untouchability in all forms. He became the Law Minister of independent India (1947-1951). With the slogan of ‘Educate-Agitate-Organize’, the movement, which he led from the 1920s until his death, brought about increased education, political representation, a widespread conversion to Buddhism and a literary awakening that was to change the lives of many untouch-ables. This passage is an extract from the Preface to Who Were the Shudras(1946). What the Orthodox Hindu will say about this book I can well imagine for I have been battling with him all these years. The only thing I did not know was how the meek and non-violent looking Hindu can be violent when anybody attacks his Sacred Books. I became aware of it as never before when last year I received a shower of letters from angry Hindus, who became quite unbalanced by my speech on the subject delivered in Madras. The letters were full of filthy abuse, unmentionable and unprintable, and full of dire threats to my life. Last time they treated me as a first offender and let me off with mere threats. I don’t know what they will do this time. For on reading the book they are sure to find more cause for anger at what in their eyes is a repetition of the offence in an aggravated form for having brought forth chapter and verse to show that what goes by the name of Sacred Books contains fabrications which are political in their motive, partisan in their composition and fraudulent in their purpose. I do not propose to take any notice of their vilifications or their threats. For I know very well that they are a base crew who, professing to defend their religion, have made religion a matter of trade. They are more selfish

than any other set of beings in the world, and are prostituting their intelligence to support the vested interests of their class. It is a matter of no small surprise that when the mad dogs of orthodoxy are let loose against a person who has the courage to raise his voice against the socalled Sacred Books of the Hindus, eminent Hindus occupying lofty places, claiming themselves to be highly educated and who could be expected to have no interest and to have a free and open mind become partisans and join the outcry. Even Hindu judges of High Courts and Hindu Prime Ministers of Indian States do not hesitate to join their kind. They go further. They not only lead the howl against him but even join in the hunt. What is outrageous is that they do so because they believe that their high stations in life would invest their words with an amount of terror which would be sufficient enough to cow down any and every opponent of orthodoxy. What I would like to tell these amiable gentlemen is that they will not be able to stop me by their imprecations. They do not seem to be aware of the profound and telling words of Dr Johnson who when confronted with analogous situation said, ‘I am not going to be deterred from catching a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian.’ I do not wish to be rude to these high-placed critics, much less do I want to say that they are playing their part of a ruffian interested in the escape of a cheat. But I do want to tell them two things: firstly that I propose, no matter what happens, to follow the determination of Dr Johnson in the pursuit of historical truth by the exposure of the Sacred Books so that the Hindus may know that it is the doctrines contained in their Sacred Books which are responsible for the decline and fall of their country and their society; secondly, if the Hindus of this generation do not take notice of what I have to say I am sure the future generation will. I do not despair of success. For I take consolation in the words of the poet Bhavabhuti who said, ‘Time is infinite and earth is vast, some day there will be born a man who will appreciate what I have said.’ Whatever that be the book is a challenge to orthodoxy. The only class of Hindus, who are likely to welcome the book are those who believe in the necessity and urgency of social reform. The fact that it is a problem which will certainly take a long time to solve and will call the efforts of many generations to come, is in their opinion, no justification for postponing the study of that problem. Even an ardent Hindu politician, if he is honest, will admit that the problems arising out of the malignant form of communalism, which is inherent in the Hindu social organization and which the politically minded Hindus desire to ignore or postpone, invariably will return to plague those very politicians at every turn. These problems are not the difficulties of the moment. They are our permanent difficulties, that is to say, difficulties of every moment. I am glad to know that such a class of Hindus exists. Small though they be, they are my mainstay and it is to them I have addressed my argument. It will be said that I have shown no respect for the sacred literature of the Hindus which every sacred literature deserves. If the charge be true, I can plead two circumstances in justification of myself. Firstly, I claim that in my research I have been guided by the best tradition of the historian who treats all literature as vulgar—I am using the word in its original sense of belonging to the people—to be examined and tested by accepted rules of evidence without recognizing any distinction between the sacred and the profane and with the sole object of, finding the truth. If in following this tradition I am found wanting in respect and reverence for the sacred literature of the Hindus my duty as a scholar must serve as my excuse. Secondly, respect and reverence for the sacred literature cannot be made to order. They are the results of social factors which make such sentiments natural in one case and quite unnatural in another. Respect and reverence for the sacred literature of the Hindus is natural to a Brahmin scholar. But it is quite unnatural in a nonBrahmin scholar. The explanation of this difference is quite simple. That a Brahmin scholar should treat this sacred literature with uncritical reverence and forbear laying on it the heavy hands which the detachment of an intellectual as distinguished from the merely educated is what is to be expected. For what is this sacred literature? It is a literature which is almost entirely the creation of the Brahmins. Secondly, its whole object is to sustain the superiority and privileges of the Brahmins as against the non-Brahmins. Why should not the Brahmins uphold the sanctity of such a literature? The very reason that leads the Brahmin to uphold it makes the non-Brahmin hate it. Knowing that what is called the sacred literature contains an abominable social philosophy which is responsible for their social degradation, the non-Brahmin reacts to it in a manner quite opposite to that of the Brahmin. That I should be wanting in respect and reverence for the sacred literature of the Hindus should not surprise anyone if it is borne in mind that I am a non-Brahmin, not even a non-Brahmin but an Untouchable. My antipathy to the sacred

literature could not naturally be less than that of the non-Brahmin. As Professor Thorndyke says: that a man thinks is a biological fact, what he thinks is a sociological fact. I am aware that this difference in the attitude of a Brahmin scholar and a non-Brahmin scholar towards this sacred literature—literature which is the main source of the material for the study of the problems of the social history of the Hindus—the former with his attitude of uncritical commendation and the latter with his attitude of unsparing condemnation is most harmful to historical research. The mischief done by the Brahmin scholars to historical research is obvious. The Brahmin scholar has a two-fold interest in the maintenance of the sanctity of this literature. In the first place being the production of his forefathers his filial duty leads him to defend it even at the cost of truth. In the second place as it supports the privileges of the Brahmins, he is careful not to do anything which would undermine its authority. The necessity of upholding the system by which he knows he stands to profit, as well as of upholding the prestige of his forefathers as the founders of the system, acts as a silent immaculate premise which is ever present in the mind of the Brahmin scholar and prevents him from reaching or preaching the truth. That is why one finds so little that is original in the field of historical research by Brahmin scholars unless it be a matter of fixing dates or tracing genealogies. The non-Brahmin scholar has none of these limitations and is therefore free to engage himself in a relentless pursuit of truth. That such a difference exists between the two classes of students is not a mere matter of speculation. This very book is an illustration in print. It contains an exposure of the real character of the conspiracy against the Shudras, which no Brahmin scholar could have had the courage to present. While it is true that a non-Brahmin scholar is free from the inhibitions of the Brahmin scholar he is likely to go to the other extreme and treat the whole literature as a collection of fables and fictions fit to be thrown on the dung heap not worthy of serious study. This is not the spirit of an historian. As has been well said, an historian ought to be exact, sincere, and impartial; free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection; and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history, the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future. In short he must have an open mind, though it may not be an empty mind, and readiness to examine all evidence even though it be spurious. The non-Brahmin scholar may find it difficult to remain true to this spirit of the historian. He is likely to import the spirit of non-Brahmin politics in the examination of the truth or falsity of the ancient literature which is not justifiable. I feel certain that in my research I have kept myself free from such prejudice. In writing about the Shudras I have had present in my ‘mind no other consideration except that of pure history. It is well known that there is a non-Brahmin movement in this country which is a political movement of the Shudras. It is also well known that I have been connected with it. But I am sure that the reader will find that I have not made this book a preface to non-Brahmin politics. I am sensible of the many faults in the presentation of the matter. The book is loaded with quotations, too long and too many. The book is not a work of art and it is possible that readers will find it tedious to go through it. But this fault is not altogether mine. Left to myself, I would have very willingly applied the pruning knife. But the book is written for the ignorant and the uninformed Shudras, who do not know how they came to be what they are. They do not care how artistically the theme is handled. All they desire is a full harvest of material—the bigger the better. Those of them to whom I have shown the manuscript have insisted upon retaining the quotations. Indeed, their avidity for such material was so great that some of them went to the length of insisting that besides giving translations in English in the body of the book I should also add the original Sanskrit texts in an Appendix. While I had to deny their request for the reproduction of the original Sanskrit texts, I could not deny their request for retaining the translations on the ground that the material is not readily available to them. When one remembers that it is the Shudras, who have largely been instrumental in sustaining the infamous system of Chaturvarnya, though it has been the primary cause of their degradation and that only the Shudras can destroy the Chaturvarnya, it would be easy to realize why I allowed the necessity of educating and thereby preparing the Shudras fully for such a sacred task to

outweigh all other considerations which favoured the deletion or if not deletion the abridgement of the quotations.

NOTES This book: The reference is to Ambedkar’s book Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to be the Fourth Varna in Indo-Aryan Society, (1946). The book is dedicated to Jotirao Phule. Dr. Johnson: Samuel Johnson (1709–84), English lexicographer and man of letters. Bhavabhuti: Sanskrit dramatist, 7 AD. Chaturvarna: The term is used to describe the four ‘varnas’ or four main groups of Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras in the Hindu myth of creation; ‘varna’, the main grouping, comprises hundreds of ‘jatis’ and their further subdivisions. The word ‘caste’ is used to describe both ‘varna’ and ‘jati’. Castes are ranked, named endogamous groups. The institution of caste is the most elaborately constructed system of discrimination that ideologically justifies an unequal distribution of economic and political power through a cultural language. Earlier in the ‘Preface’ Ambedkar observes: ‘Chaturvarna would have been a very innocent principle if it meant no more than a mere division of society into four classes …the theory goes further and makes the system of graded inequality the basis for determining the terms of associated life’.

QUESTIONS 1.

Why does the writer launch an attack on the so-called ‘sacred books’?

2.

According to Ambedkar ‘communalism … is inherent in the Hindu social organization’. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.

3.

Discuss how a non-Brahman scholar is better qualified to undertake historical research.

4.

Why does Ambedkar caution the reader against making ‘this book a preface to non-Brahman politics’?

_______________ From The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar. Edited by Valerian Rodrigues. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.

GENDER

7 Shakespeare’s Sister Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was born in London and was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a distinguished literary man. She grew up in a large and talented family, educating herself in her father’s magnificent library, and meeting many eminent men of letters. Later she settled with her sister and two brothers in Bloomsbury, which became a meeting ground for several brilliant, artistic and literary people, together referred to as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. One of these was Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married, and with whom she founded a printing venture called Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf occupies an important position in modern writing in English. She is associated with the stream of consciousness technique in novel writing, subtly exploring the significance of identity, time, change and memory for human personality. Some of her novels are Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). Woolf was strongly concerned about the position of women, especially professional women, and the constraints they suffered. She wrote several essays on the subject, notably in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ is a selection taken from Chapter Three and the conclusion of the final chapter of A Room of One’s Own, a text considered an early landmark in modern feminist writing. A Room of One’s Own was based upon papers presented by Woolf at Newnham and Girton, both women’s colleges at Cambridge. It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because—this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one’s head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dishwater. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the inquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth. For it is a perennial puzzle why no women wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan’s History of England. Once more I looked up Women, found ‘position of,’ and turned to the pages indicated. ‘Wife-beating,’ I read, “was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low…. Similarly,’ the historian goes on, ‘the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten, and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the “chivalrous” upper classes…. Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when

they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.’ That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of Stuarts. ‘It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so.’ Professor Trevelyan concludes, ‘neither Shakespeare’s women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneysand the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.’ Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare’s women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burned like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time— Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary Madame de Guermantes—the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women ‘lacking in personality and character.’ Indeed, if women had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten, and flung about the room. A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards—a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan women, one branch of illumination fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter heading that it meant— ‘The Manor Court and Methods of Open-Field Agriculture… The Cistercians and Sheep-Farming …The Crusades… The University… The House of Commons… The Hundred Years’s War… The Wars of the Roses… The Renaissance Scholars… The Dissolution of the Monasteries. … Agrariar and Religious strife… The Origin of English Sea Power… The Armada….’ and so on. Occasionally an individual women is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?— is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring. I

thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though, I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lopsided; but why should they not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to the public for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd: even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare. I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman who is dead now, but was bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare. Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil, and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theater; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theater, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the place of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter— indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night, and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theater. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and

women acting—no woman, he said, could possible be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same gray eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle! That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of laws and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fizgerald, I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night. This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-manager without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man), that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

NOTES Professor Trevelyan’s History of England:G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England then held the place of the standard one-volume history of the country. Verneys and the Hutchinsons: The first is a reference to the Memoirs of the Verney Family, and the latter to Lucy Hutchinson’s biography of her husband, Col. John Hutchinson. Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind:Shakespearean heroines in Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and As You Like It, respectively. Clytemnestra … Madame de Guermantes:Women protagonists in, respectively, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon; Sophocles’ Antigone; Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth; Racine’s Phedre;Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, A You Like It and Othello; Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi; Congreve’s The Way of the World;Richardson’s Clarissa; Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; and Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Aubrey: John Aubrey, a seventeenth century English diarist. Mitford, Austen, Baillie, Poe: Mitford (1787–1855), poet and novelist well-known for her portraits of country life. Austen (1775–1817), well-known English novelist. Baillie (1762–1851), poet and dramatist. Poe (1809–1849), American poet and short story writer. Ovid, Virgil, Horace: Classical Latin poets whose works were part of the standard curriculum in boys’ schools. Wool-stapler: A dealer in wool, so called since wool was a ‘staple’ product of sixteenth century England. The Elephant and Castle: A tavern located at a busy crossroads in south London. Suicides were generally buried at crossroads. Emily Bronte, Robert Burns: Bronte, significant nineteenth century novelist and poet. Burns, a working class Scottish poet (1759–1796) who wrote in his native dialect. Edward Fitzgerald: Nineteenth century English poet and translator. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand:Male pseudonyms, respectively of Charlotte Bronte, Marian Evans, and Aurore Dupin. Pericles: Athenian statesman and orator (495–429 BC). Milton’s bogey: A reference to Paradise Lost, an epic poem by John Milton (1608–1674), which portrays Eve as morally and intellectually secondary to Adam.

QUESTIONS 1.

Why does Woolf turn to history books in her attempt to find out about women writers?

2.

‘But by no means could middle class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past.’ Explain why most women would get excluded from the ‘the historian’s view of the past’.

3.

Analyse the complex attitude of her family, particularly her father, towards Judith in Woolf’s imaginative reconstruction.

4.

‘At last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman…’ Comment on Woolf’s irony here.

5.

What kind of value does the hypothetical Shakespeare’s sister assume in the final paragraph? Describe the tone of this section.

_______________ From A Room of One’s Own. Edited by Morag Shiach, Chapter III, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

8 The Exercise Book Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, the fourteenth and youngest child in a rich and talented family. The latter half of the nineteenth century was an exciting time for the Bengali elite, a period of intellectual and artistic awakening, referred to as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’. Raja Rammohan Roy, the social reformer, was an important figure associated with the Bengal Renaissance, and was a close friend of Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanath Tagore, also an eminent personality of the time. Many members of the Tagore family were illustrious and outstanding, and the Tagores ran their own literary magazines, and wrote and produced their own plays. Tagore himself was a poet, short-story writer, novelist, playwright and essayist; a pioneer in education who established Santiniketan; an initiator of economic projects for community development, and an actively engaged thinker in the context of nationalist struggles. In 1913, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. As a child, Tagore showed resistance to formal schooling, apart from which he was educated at home by tutors and elder brothers. At seventeen, he went to England and this two-year experience of a different culture helped to raise various social questions, particularly about gender relations in his own society in the mind of the young Rabindranath. His close experience of the women’s quarters, particularly his relationship with older sisters-in law, had already given him a sensitive insight into the constriction and confinement of women in his milieu. These engagements of Tagore found an intellectual context in the many debates about the position and role of women and the desirability of reform, current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of Tagore’s finest works, for instance the short story ‘Strir Patra’ or ‘The Wife’s Letter’ (1914), are sensitive explorations of women’s lives and experiences in contemporary Bengal. Uma became a great nuisance as soon as she learned to write. On every wall in the house, she would draw unsteady lines and write with a piece of coal in big unformed letters—Rain drops on tree tops. She hunted out the copy of Haridas’s Secretsunder her sister-in-law’s pillow and wrote in pencil on every page—Black water, red flower. With huge scrawled letters, she obliterated most of the auspicious dates in the new almanac kept for the household’s constant use. Right in the middle of the credits column in her father’s account book, she wrote— He who writes and studies hard Will one day ride a horse and cart. So long she had never been thwarted in these literary pursuits, but in the end, one day, there was a major disaster. Uma’s elder brother Gobindalal looked inoffensive enough, but he was always writing in the newspapers. Listening to him talk, not one of his relatives or neighbours would ever think him

capable of deep thought; and indeed no one could ever accuse him of thinking on any subject; but he wrote. And his views coincided entirely with those of most readers in Bengal. Without any recourse to logic, depending solely on the effect of his thrilling rhetoric, Gobindalal had composed an entertaining essay vigorously demolishing the grave misconceptions about physiology current among European scientists. One day, in the afternoon when no one was about, Uma took her brother’s pen and ink and wrote on the essay in very large letters—Gopal is a very good boy, he eats whatever is given him. I do not think that by her use of the name ‘Gopal’, Uma had intended any special reflection on the readers of her brother’s essay. But her brother’s anger knew no bounds. First he beat her then he confiscated her carefully collected, meagre store of writing implements—a stubby pencil and a blunt ink-stained pen. The humiliated little girl, unable fully to understand the reason for so severe a punishment, sat in a corner of the room and began to cry. After the period of discipline was over, Gobindalal somewhat remorsefully returned Uma’s looted property, and moreover tried to assuage the little girl’s grief by presenting her with a bound, ruled, stout exercise book. Uma was then seven years old. From that day on, this exercise-book spent its nights under Uma’s pillow and its days under her arm or in her lap. When, her hair in a tiny braid, accompanied by a maid, she went to the girls’ school in the village, the exercise-book went along with her. The sight of it would arouse wonder in some of the girls, greed or envy in others. In the first year, she wrote carefully in her exercise-book—The birds sing, the night is past. She would sit on the floor of her bedroom clutching the exercise-book, and write, read and declaim loudly in a sing-song voice. In this way she collected many lines of prose and poetry. In the second year, a few independent compositions began to make their appearance. They were very brief but extremely pregnant, lacking both introduction and conclusion. We may offer a few examples. Below where she had copied out the tale of the tiger and heron from Kathamala, you would come across a line not to be found in Kathamala, nor for that matter anywhere in Bengali literature to this day. The line ran as follows—‘ I love Jashi very much.’ Let no one think that I am about to tell a love story. Jashi was not an eleven or twelve-year-old boy of the neighbourhood. She was an elderly servant of the household, her real name being Jashoda. But it is impossible to gauge the real nature of the little girl’s feeling for Jashi from this one sentence. He who wished to write a reliable history of this matter would find a clear denial of the earlier statement just two pages later. This is not just one instance: throughout Uma’s compositions, one might note this fault of selfcontradiction. In one place we might read—‘I’ll never speak to Hari again.’ (Not a boy, Haricharan, but a girl schoolmate of Uma’s called Haridasi.) But soon after that was a statement which might induce one to think that Uma had no dearer friend in all the world than Hari. Next year, when the little girl was nine years old, the strains of the shehnai could be heard one morning in the house. It was Uma’s wedding-day. The groom was called Pyarimohan; he was a literary associate of Gobindalal’s. Although he was not very old and had received some education, his mind had remained entirely closed to new ways of thought. For this reason he was very highly regarded by his neighbours, and Gobindalal tried to follow his example, though without complete success.

Draped in a Benarasi sari, her little face veiled, Uma went weeping to her husband’s house. Her mother told her, ‘Listen to your mother-in-law, darling; attend to the household, don’t spend all your time reading and writing.’ Gobindalal told her, ‘Remember not to scratch letters on the walls; it’s not that kind of house. And for heaven’s sake don’t scribble on any of Pyarimohan’s writings.’ The little girl’s heart quaked. She realized that no one would make allowances for her in the house to which she was going. Through many reprimands suffered over many days, she would have to learn what they regarded as fault, what an offence, what an oversight. The shehnai was playing again that morning. But it is doubtful whether there was one person in the crowd who understood what was going on the trembling heart of that little girl covered with ornaments, in her veil and Benarasi sari. Jashi went with Uma. It was understood that she would stay for a few days to settle Uma in her in-laws’ house, and then return. The kind-hearted Jashi, after much thought, took Uma’s exercise-book along with her. The book was part of her paternal house, a loving reminder of her brief stay in the house of her birth. In crooked, unformed letters it told the abridged history of her parents’ love and care for her. It brought a brief savour of tender freedom to the little girl in the midst of her premature wifeliness. In the first few days after her arrival in her in-laws’ house, Uma wrote nothing; she had no time. At length, some days later, Jashi returned to her former residence. That day, Uma shut the door of her bedroom in the afternoon, took the exercise-book out of her tin box, and wrote tearfully in it—‘Jashi has gone home, I want to go back to Mother too.’ Now Uma no longer had the leisure to copy anything out of the Charupath or the Bodhoday, perhaps she did not have the inclination either. So nowadays there were no great intervals between Uma’s own brief compositions. Immediately after the above statement, we might read— ‘if Dada comes to take me home just once, I’ll never spoil his writings again’. It is said that Uma’s father often attempted to bring Uma home, but Gobindalal teamed up with Pyarimohan to frustrate these plans. He said that now as the time for Uma to learn devotion to her husband; if she was brought away frequently from her husband’s house into the familiar ambit of her parents’ love, her mind would be unnecessarily distracted. Mixing advice and mockery, he composed so excellent an essay on this theme that none of his like-minded readers could refrain from admitting the undeniable truth of his exposition. Having heard people say this, Uma wrote in her exercise-book—‘Dada, I beg of you, take me home just once, I’ll never make you angry again.’ One day, Uma had shut the door and was writing some such meaningless triviality in her exercise-book. Her sister in-law Tilakmanjari become exceedingly curious. She thought, I must find out what Boudidi does when she shuts the door every so often. Through a crack in the door, she observed that Uma was writing. She was amazed. The goddess of learning Saraswati, had never made even so secret a visit to the women’s quarters of their house. Her younger sister Kananmanjari also come to have a peep. And the still younger Anangamanjari—she too stood on tiptoe and looked with much difficulty through the crack in the door to penetrate the mystery of the locked room.

As she was writing, Uma suddenly heard the laughter of three familiar voices outside the room. She realized what had happened. Hastily shutting the book away in her box, she hid her face on the bed in shame and terror. Pyarimohan was much disturbed by this news. If women began to read and write, novels and plays would soon make their way into the home and it would be hard to uphold the household virtues. Moreover, he had, by special reflection, evolved an exceedingly subtle theory. He said that the power of the female and the power of the male together produced the sacred power of the conjugal relationship; but if the power of the female was vanquished through education and study, the power of the male alone would be paramount. Then male power would clash with male power to produce so terrible a destructive energy that the power of the conjugal bond would be completely destroyed, and so the woman would become a widow. To this day no one has been able to refute this theory. On returning home in the evening, Pyarimohan scolded Uma roundly, and made fun of her as well, saying, ‘We’ll have to order a lawyer’s turban; my wife will go to office with a pen tucked behind her ear.’ Uma was unable to understand all this. Since she had not read Pyarimohan’s essay, she had not learnt to appreciate such wit. But she shrank within herself—it seemed to her that if the earth opened, she would disappear into its depths to hide her shame. For many days after that, she did not write in her book. But one day, on an autumn morning, a beggar-woman was singing an Agamani song outside. Uma sat listening silently at the window, resting her face on bars. The autumn sun in any case brought back memories of childhood; on top of that, the Agamani song was too much for Uma to bear. Uma could not sing; but since learning to write, she had developed the habit of writing down any song she heard, to lessen the pain of not being able to sing it. Today the beggar-woman was singing— The folk of the city say to Uma’s mother ‘Your lost light has returned.’ At this, half-crazed, the queen rushes out— Where are you, Uma, where are you! The queen says weeping, ‘My Uma, you’ve come, Come to me, my darling, come to my arms, Come to me, my darling, let me hold you just once.’ At this, stretching her arms around her mother’s neck, Uma weeps in hurt pride and says so the queen, ‘Why didn’t you come to fetch your daughter?’

Resentful anguish welled up in Uma’s heart, her eyes filled with tears. She called the singer secretly to her room, shut the door and began to write down the song in her eccentric spelling. Tilakmanjari, Kanakmanjari and Anangamanjari observed everything through the crack in the door, and burst out, clapping their hands, ‘Boudidi we’ve seen what you’re doing!’ Uma quickly unfastened the door, came out and began to plead with them, ‘Darling sisters, please don’t tell anybody. I beg you, please don’t. I’ll never do it again, I’ll never write again—’ At length, Uma noticed that Tilakmanjari was eyeing her exercise-book. She ran and clutched the book to her chest. Her sisters in-law tried to take it away from her by force, but when they did not succeed, Anangamanjari went to summon her brother.

Pyarimohan arrived and sat down grimly on the bed. He said in a voice like thunder, ‘Give me the exercise-book.’ Seeing that his command was not obeyed, he lowered his voice a couple of notes and said: ‘Give it to me.’ The little girl clasped the exercise-book to her chest and directed a glance of utter supplication at her husband’s face. But when she saw Pyarimohan was getting up to snatch the book from her, she flung it down, covered her face with her hands and collapsed on the floor. Pyarimohan took the exercise-book and started to read the litle girl’s compositions out in a loud voice. Hearing this, Uma clasped the earth in a still tighter embrace, while the other three little girls were beside themselves with laughter. After that day, Uma never got back her exercise-book. Pyarimohan had an exercise-book too, filled with barbed essays expounding his elaborate theories. But there was no benefactor of humankind to seize that book and destroy it.

NOTES Rain drops on tree tops: Literally ‘water drops, the leaves shake’: a rhyme commonly taught to small children learning to read. Haridas’s Secrets: A sensational novel by Bhubanchandra Mukhopadhyaya, published in parts between 1871 and 1873, it became popular ‘forbidden’ reading for Bengalis in the late nineteenth century. Black water, red flower: Closely suggests Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s pioneering textbook Barnaparichay. He who writes, etc.: A traditional rhyme popular among primer-writers, reflecting the aspirations of the new educated middle-class. The birds sing, etc.: The opening lines of a poem by Madanmohan Tarkalankar, commonly included in textbooks. Kathamala: A book of animal fables by Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, mainly based on Aesop. Charupath, Bodhoday: Popular school primers. Agamani song: A traditional song to welcome the goddess Durga to her parents’ home, which she is held to visit at the time of Durga Puja in early autumn. ‘Uma’ is another name for Durga.

QUESTIONS 1.

Analyse the significance of the exercise book for Uma. What do the examples of Uma’s writing suggest about her?

2.

Can this story be read as a strong reformist plea for greater equality in educational opportunities for men and women?

3.

Comment on the story’s depiction of child marriage.

4.

Can the song for Durga be seen as an ironic juxtaposition with Uma’s situation? What are the ways in which it is ironic?

5.

Assess the narratorial attitude towards Uma, Gobindalal and Pyarimohan. Analyse the following descriptions:

1. 2.

‘Uma became a great nuisance as soon as she learnt to write’. ‘His [Gobindalal’s] views coincided entirely with those of most readers in Bengal’.

3.

‘He [Pyarimohan] had, by special reflection, evolved an exceedingly subtle theory.’

6.

Do you think it is possible for a writer sensitively or effectively to portray a situation that he may not have personally suffered? Consider Premchand’s ‘Deliverance’ and Tagore’s ‘The Exercise Book’ with reference to this question.

_______________ From: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. This story is translated by Supriya Chaudhuri.

9 Girl Jamaica Kincaid Jamaica Kincaid (1949–) is a writer from Antigua in the West Indies. Born Elaine Potter Richardson, she adopted Jamaica Kincaid, the choice of ‘Jamaica’ evoking the West Indies. She left Antigua at the age of sixteen, and later settled in America, where she started publishing in magazines. Her works include the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), the short story collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), a book-length essay about Antigua, A Small Place(1988), and My Brother (1997), a memoir of her brother's death from AIDS. Kincaid’s work is characterized by a strong awareness of the colonial history of the West Indies. Several of her works are centred around the difficulties of teenage girls coming of age, and her own complex relationship with her mother in early youth has sometimes been seen as reflected in the experiences of her protagonists. In her novel Lucy, the mother-daughter relationship finds a parallel in that of the mother country and the colony. Reflecting on her colonial education, Kincaid says: ‘I was always being told I should be something, and then my whole upbringing was something I was not: English.’ ‘Girl’ is a piece from At the Bottom of the River, which is also described as a series of prosepoems. Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sunday at all and never in Sunday School; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your khaki pant so that it don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile at someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is

how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?

NOTES Benna: Also known as ‘calypso’, it is a type of popular song that originated in Trinidad, West Indies. The text, often containing nonsense syllables, is sung rapidly and without regard for natural word stress. Accompanied by guitars and percussion, the calypso usually satirizes local events. Wharf-rat: Literally, a large brown rat that is commonly found on wharves. Idiomatically, a person who lives or loiters near wharves, often existing by stealing from ships or warehouses. Dasheen: A tropical plant, cultivated for its tuberous, starchy, edible root. Doukona: A kind of pudding. Pepper pot: A West Indian stew.

QUESTIONS 1.

Comment on the range of advice given in the piece.

2.

Whose speaking voice or voices do you think the piece represents?

3.

What do the italicized sections represent? What is the tone of those sections?

4.

What is the significance of ‘singing benna in Sunday school’?

5.

What kind of statement does ‘Girl’ make about the conditioning of girls in a patriarchal society?

6.

Analyse the sentence organisation in the piece. What effect does it create?

7.

Can the piece be called a ‘dramatic monologue’? How do indications about the listener shape our response to the piece?

8.

What are the features that make it possible to refer to ‘Girl’ as a prose-poem?

_______________ From Literature and Gender. Edited by Elizabeth Goodman, London: Routledge in Association with London Open University, 1996.

10 Breaking Out Marge Piercy Marge Piercy (1936– ) was born in Detroit, USA, into a family that had been, like many others, affected by the Depression. Her father, out of work for some time, got a job installing and repairing heavy machinery at Westinghouse. When Piercy was a young child, they moved into a small house in a working-class neighbourhood in Detroit. At seventeen, Piercy went to study at the University of Michigan, and she has participated vigorously in many progressive movements, such as civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, feminism, and recently, the resistance to the Iraq war. She is the author of seventeen novels including Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Gone to Soldiers (1987) and The Longings of Women (1994) as well as seventeen volumes of poetry, some of which are The Moon is Always Female (1980), Circles on the Water(1982) and What are Big Girls Made of (1997). ‘Breaking Out’ was first published in the Harbor Review in 1984. My first political act? I am seeing two doors that usually stood open, leaning together like gossips, making a closet of their corner.

A mangle stood there, for ironing what I never thought needed it: sheets, towels, my father’s underwear; sheets, towels, my father’s underwear;

an upright vacuum with its stuffed sausage bag that deflated with a gusty sigh as if weary of housework as I, who swore I would never dust or sweep

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10

after I left home, who hated to see my mother removing daily the sludge the air lay down like a snail’s track so that when in school I read of Sisyphus and his rock, it was her I thought of, housewife scrubbing on raw knees as the factories rained ash.

Nasty stork king of the hobnobbing doors was a wooden yardstick dusty

15

20

with chalk marks from hems’ rise and fall.

When I had been judged truly wicked that stick was the tool of punishment, I was beaten as I bellowed like a locomotive as if noise could ward off blows. 25

My mother wielded it more fiercely but my father longer and harder. I’d twist my head in the mirror to inspect.

I’d study those red and blue mountain ranges as on a map that offered escape, the veins and arteries the roads I could travel to freedom when I grew.

30

When I was eleven, after a beating I took and smashed the ruler to kindling. Fingering the splinters I could not believe. 35 How could this road prove weaker than me? It was not that I was never again beaten But in destroying that stick that had measured my pain the next day I was an adolescent, not a child.

This is not a tale of innocence lost but power gained: I would not be Sisyphus, There were things that I should learn to break.

40

NOTES Mangle: (In the US) a machine used for ironing damp sheets etc, using heated rollers. Vacuum … sausage bag: Old-style upright vacuum cleaners had a cloth bag attached, which inflated with air as the dust was sucked into the machine. This bag is imaged as a sausage here. Sisyphus: A legendary Greek king of Corinth. For various offences he was condemned in the underworld eternally to roll a boulder to the top of a hill from where it always rolled down again.

QUESTIONS 1.

What is the ‘first political act’ that the poem begins with referring to, and why is it called that?

2.

What do you think the comparison of the mother with Sisyphus suggests?

3.

What are the uses of the yardstick in this poem and are they related in some way?

4.

How does the poem’s treatment of household chores relate to its treatment of physical violence?

5.

Do you think that the speaker in the poem was in a position of double oppression as a child, and as a girl?

6.

Comment on the implication of ‘as the factories rained ash’.

7.

The speaker in the poem responds to violence with a violent act. How do you assess this?

_______________ From My Mother’s Body, Alfred A. Knopf., Inc. 1985. First published in The Harbor Review, No. 4, 1984.

11 A Prayer For My Daughter William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born in Dublin, Ireland. His family, which was Protestant, originally hailed from England, but had been in Ireland for several generations. The Yeats family was in London from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland. Yeats’s childhood and early manhood were thus spent between Dublin, London and Sligo (in the West of Ireland), and each of these places contributed to his poetic development. Yeats’s personal, public and poetic life is marked by his negotiation of turn-of-the-century Irish nationalism. Significant in this context is the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. She is a figure compared with Helen in various poems, notably in ‘No Second Troy’ and ‘A Woman Homer Sung’. Yeats had strong differences with Maud Gonne over her commitment to revolutionary violence. She married the revolutionary leader John MacBride, who was executed after the Easter rising of 1916. Yeats was also deeply engaged with traditions of esoteric thought, turning to mysticism and folklore, finally elaborating a symbolic system of his own based on a variety of sources. One of the most significant twentieth century poets, Yeats published numerous volumes of poetry between 1889 and 1939. Some of these are The Rose (1893), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1893) and The Tower (1928). ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (1919), written soon after the birth of his daughter Anne Butler Yeats, is from the volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, 15 Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not

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Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, 20 Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chose found life flat and dull 25 And later had much trouble from a fool, While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray, Being fatherless could have her way Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man. It’s certain that fine women eat 30 A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned By those that are not entirely beautiful; 35 Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise, And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes. 40

May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound, Nor but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. O may she live some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be off all evil chances chief. If there’s no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind 55 Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,

45

50

So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn, 60 Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

65

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75

80

NOTES Gregory’s wood: A part of the Gregory Estate. Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature was an associate of Yeats’s. He spent many holidays at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway, and discovered the attractiveness of the ‘country house ideal’, seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos. Yeats’s home in 1919, Thoor Ballylee, was not far from Coole Park. Helen: In Greek legend, the daughter of Zeus, the supreme god, famed for her extraordinary beauty. She married Menelaus, King of Sparta, but later fled to Troy with Paris. The ‘fool’ is Menelaus, who then fought the Trojan War and finally retrieved Helen. That Great Queen: Aphrodite, the goddess of love in Greek mythology (Venus in Roman mythology), supposed to have arisen from the sea. She married the lame Vulcan, god of fire and patron of smiths. Horn of Plenty: In Greek mythology, the horn of a goat on whose milk Zeus was fed as a child, thereafter becoming a source and emblem of abundance and plenty. The loveliest woman born: Maud Gonne.

QUESTIONS 1.

Is ‘murderous innocence’ an oxymoron? What does the phrase signify in the context?

2.

What are the poet’s views on beauty and courtesy in women?

3.

What is the significance of the poet praying for his daughter to be ‘a flourishing tree’, ‘rooted in one dear perpetual place’?

4.

How far do you think the poet’s denunciation of an ‘opinionated mind’ is based on the gender of the child he is praying for?

5.

Analyse the significance of the first line of the last stanza and the development that it signals.

6.

What do think the opposition between ‘house’ and ‘thoroughfares’ signifies?

7.

Compare Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ with W.B. Yeats’ ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ as instances of prescriptive catalogues for girl children.

_______________ From Selected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Edited by Norman Jeffaries, London: Macmillan, 1955.

12 Marriages Are Made Eunice De Souza Eunice de Souza (1940– ), poet and novelist, was born in Pune, educated there and in Mumbai and the United States. For nearly thirty years from 1969, she taught English literature at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, retiring from there as head of the department. ‘Teaching was finally about changing or modifying or touching the lives of students,’ she felt. Her first poetry collection Fix (1979), ‘… hard-edged and somewhat violent’, led on to three more, Women in Dutch Painting (1988), Ways of Belonging(1990) and Selected and New Poems (1994). Ways of Belonging with its attempts at imagistic poetry was awarded a Poetry Book Society recommendation in 1990. De Souza has written four collections of folk tales for children and edited the anthologies Nine Indian Women Poets (1997), Women’s Voices: Selections from 19th and early 20th century Indian Writing in English(2002), and Purdah (2004). Dangerlok (2001), her novel about urban life and its absurdities, loneliness and danger, was followed by Dev and Simran in 2003. De Souza comes from the Goan Catholic community, and several of her poems are ironic reflections on her community and background. Some of these poems also throw open questions about the relation between institutionalized religion and gender issues. My cousin Elena is to be married The formalities have been completed: her family history examined 5 for T.B. and madness her father declared solvent her eyes examined for squints her teeth for cavities her stools for the possible 10 non-Brahmin worm. She’s not quite tall enough and not quite full enough (children will take care of that) Her complexion it was decided 15 would compensate, being just about the right shade of rightness to do justness to Francisco X. Noronha Prabhu 20 good son of Mother Church.

QUESTIONS 1.

Analyse the title of the poem.

2.

Examine the use of the passive voice in the poem. What effect does it produce?

3.

Comment on line 20.

4.

What impact does the last line create? Is it related to the tone of the poem as a whole?

_______________ From Literature and Gender. Edited by Elizabeth Goodman, London: Routledge in association with London Open University 1996.

13 Yellow Fish Ambai Ambai is the pen-name of the Tamil writer C.S. Lakshmi (1944–). Her grandmother and her mother, a musician, were important influences on Ambai in early life. Ambai herself has been a musician as well as an academic. Her works include Siragugal Muriyum or Wings Get Broken (1976), a collection of short stories, The Face behind the Mask (1984), a study ofwomen writers in Tamil, and The Singer and the Song: Conversations with Women Musicians (2000), apart from many contributions to literary journals. About her early writing in her teenage years, Ambai says: ‘Most of my initial stories had very rigid and orthodox views of sexuality, femininity, and life in general. The widows in my stories, after a speech full of symbolic metaphors, always refused to remarry, and my heroines married idealists who were combinations of Tagore, Ramakrishna, and Vivekananda.’ However, now Ambai’s writing is considered a significant voice of feminist self-affirmation in Tamil fiction, exploring various aspects of women’s experience in innovative literary styles. Some of the recurring engagements of her work include silence, communication and coming to terms with one’s body or sexuality. High Summer. Already the sand feels hot. It will not hold its wetness. Away, to the left of the shrunken sea and spent waves, the sand spreads like a desert. Yet the eye is compelled by the sea alone. Now the white boat has arrived. This is the forerunner. Its appearance is the signal that the fishing boats are returning. It floats ashore like a swan, swaying from side to side. Far from the shore, bright spots being to move. The fisherwomen make ready to welcome the boats ashore. Bright colours: blinding indigo, demonic red, profound green, assaulting blue. They stand vibrant against the white boat upon a faded blue and ash-grey sea. Now it is possible to see the other boats. Walking further, quite close to the boats you may see the fish filling the nets. Bodies and hands darkened by the salt wind, the men will spread their nets and start sorting the fish the minute the boats come in. Now the fish splash into plastic troughs, round eyes wide open. The unwanted ones are thrown away. There is a general murmur of tired voices, rising for a split second, then falling. Black hands. Brown wood of the boats. Between the meshes of the nets, white-bellied fish. Crowding near, the colours of the saris press upon the eyes gently but firmly. Painted troughs. Dry sand. An extraordinary collage of colours, on the shores of the wind-spread sea. A composition that imprints itself on the mind and memory. A yellow fish is thrown away on the sand. Of that palest yellow that comes before the withering and falling of leaves. It has black spots. As I stoop to watch, it begins to shudders and leap. The mouth gasps; gasps and closes. It shudders and tosses on the hot sand. That mouth closes; closes and opens, desperate for water. Like Talaia’s mouth. Too hasty infant Jalaja’s mouth. She pushed and bumped her way out into the world. Her name had already been decided. She who rises from the waters. Lotus. Jalaja. They had to put her in an incubator. I stood outside that room constantly, watching her. Her pale red mouth. Her round eyes. Sometimes she would open and close her mouth, as if sucking.

The ashes which Arun brought back from the electric crematorium were in a small urn, a miniature of those huge earthen-ware jars of Mohenjodaro and Harappa. Its narrow month was tied with a piece of cloth. ‘Why is the mouth closed?’ ‘What mouth?’ ‘The mouth of the urn. Open it.’ ‘Anu. It contains only ashes.’ ‘I want to see. Open it.’ ‘Anu. It contains only ashes.’ ‘I want to see. Open it.’ ‘Anu.’ ‘Open its mouth. That mouth…’ Loud racking sobs. The cloth was removed to reveal the urn’s tiny mouth. The ashes were in this very sea. The sea is at some distance. The yellow fish leaps hopelessly towards it. Its mouth falls open, skyward. Lifted from the hot sand, it falls away from the fingers, heaving and tossing. It falls away again from a leaf with which I try to hold it. A fisherboy is on his way back from splashing in the waves. He comes when I summon him in Marathi, ‘Ikkade e, come here.’ ‘Will you throw this yellow fish back into the sea?’ A quick snort of laughter. He grabs the fish firmly by its tail and starts running towards the sea. I run after him. He places it on the crest of an incoming wave. For a moment it splutters, helpless, like a drunk who cannot find the way home. Again it opens its mouth to the water, taking it in. Then a swish of the tail fin. An arrogant leap. Once again it swishes its tail and swims forward. You can see its clear yellow for a very long time. Then it merges into the blue-grey-white of the sea.

QUESTIONS 1.

At what point is the first-person ‘I’ introduced in the piece? How does the narrator present the scene before that? What effect does this create?

2.

How is the impact of colour employed in the story?

3.

What is the image that connects the yellow fish with Jalaja in the narrator’s mind? Does it recur later in the piece?

4.

Analyse the conversation between Anu and Arun.

5.

What significance do sea and water have in the story?

6.

What do you think is the theme of the story?

7.

How far would it be correct to say that Ambai’s story concerns an experience specific to a woman’s body? Compare it to Virginia Woolf’s understanding of Judith Shakespeare’s body and sexuality and how it shapes her experience.

_______________ From A Purple Sea: Short Stories. Translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström, Madras: Manas Books, 1992.

14 Reincarnation Of Captain Cook Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood (1939–) is a prominent Canadian writer. She was born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, but her formal schooling was frequently interrupted by extensive trips to the northern Ontario and Quebec, where her father did entomological research. In 1962 she graduated from the University of Toronto and also published her first book of poems. Atwood has held positions at English Departments at various Canadian universities. Apart from several volumes of poetry, her works include novels such as The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing(1972), and The Robber’s Bride (1993), as well as volumes of short stories such as True Stories(1982) and Wilderness Tips (1991). Atwood’s work seems to show a double engagement, with the cultural colonisation of Canada by English and American influences, and the sexual subordination of women to men. The ‘Reincarnation of Captain Cook’ is from the volume Selected Poems (1976). Earlier than I could learn the maps had been coloured in. When I pleaded, the kings told me nothing was left to explore.

I set out anyway, but everywhere I went there were historians, wearing wreaths and fake teeth belts; or in the deserts, cairns

and tourists. Even the caves had candle stubs, inscriptions quickly scribbled in darkness. I could

never arrive. Always the names got there before.

Now I am old I know my mistake was my acknowledging of maps. The eyes raise tired monuments.

Burn down the atlases, I shout to the park benches; and go

past the cenotaph waving a blank banner across the street, beyond the corner

into a land cleaned of geographies, its beach gleaming with arrows.

NOTES Captain Cook: Captain James Cook (1728–79) was a British navigator and cartographer. He joined the Royal Navy and served in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). During this time, he surveyed the St. Lawrence River in North America. He had the command of an expedition to Tahiti to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the sun and to discover Terra Australis, a presumed southern continent. The expedition set sail in the Endeavour in 1768 and, after completing the observation of Venus, Cook went on to discover and chart New Zealand and the east coast of Australia.

QUESTIONS 1.

What do cartographers and historians signify for the speaker?

2.

What is the significance of ‘names’ in the poem?

3.

Comment on the implication of ‘cenotaph’.

4.

Does ‘Reincarnation of Captain Cook’ indicate a reference only to a model removed in time, or to one belonging to a particular gender role too?

_______________ From Literature and Gender. Edited by Elizabeth Goodman. London: Routledge in association with London Open University, 1996.

15 Highway Stripper A.K. Ramanujan Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (1929–1993) was born in Mysore, and was fluent in both Kannada, the common language of Mysore, and Tamil, the language of his family. Ramanujan studied English language and literature at the University of Mysore, and later, in 1959 went to the USA. From 1962 onwards, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was instrumental in shaping the South Asian Studies program. Ramanujan and his colleagues have made the West more aware of the other languages and literary traditions of India outside the Sanskrit. Ramanujan’s contributions span cultural theory, poetry, translation, linguistics and folklore. Some of his significant works include the essay ‘Is There an Indian way of Thinking?’ (1990), the commentary in The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classic Tamil Anthology (1967), the translation from classical Tamil, Poems of Love and War (1985), and several volumes of poetry. Ramanujan wrote poetry almost entirely in English, and he is a major voice in modern Indian poetry in English. Many of his poems emerge out of transcultural experience and reflect upon themes of hybridity. ‘Highway Stripper’ was published in the volume Second Sight (1986). Once as I was travelling on a highway to Mexico behind a battered once-blue Mustang with a dusty rear window, the wind really sang for me when suddenly out of the side of the speeding car in front of me a woman’s hand with a wrist-watch on it threw away a series of whirling objects on to the hurtling road:

a straw hat, a white shoe fit to be a fetish, then another, a heavy pleated skirt and a fluttery slip, faded pink, frayed lace-edge and all (I even heard it swish),

a leg-of-mutton blouse just as fluttery.

And as I stepped on the gas and my car lunged into the fifty feet between me and them, a rather ordinary, used, and off-white bra for smallish breasts whirled off the window and struck a farmer’s barbed wire with yellow-green wheat grass beyond and spread-eagled on it, pinned by the blowing wind.

Then before I knew, bright red panties laced with white hit my windshield and I flinched, I swerved, but then it was gone, swept aside before I straightened up— fortunately, no one else on the road:

excited, curious to see the stripper on the highway, maybe with an urgent lover’s one free hand (or were there more?) on her breast or thigh, I stepped again on the gas, frustrated by their dusty rear window at fifty feet, I passed them

at seventy.

In that absolute second, that glimpse and afterimage in this hell of voyeurs, I saw only one at the wheel: a man, about forty,

a spectacled profile looking only at the road beyond the nose of his Mustang, with a football radio on.

again and again I looked in my rearview mirror as I steadied my pace

against the circling trees, but there was only a man:

had he stripped not only hat and blouse, shoes and panties and bra, had he shed maybe even the woman he was wearing,

or was it me moulting, shedding vestiges, old investments, rushing forever

towards a perfect coupling with naked nothing in a world without places?

NOTES Mustang: A sturdy car manufactured by Ford, named after a small, hardy wild horse of the North American plains. The name of the horse has a Spanish etymology: mestengo meaning ‘a stray or ownerless beast’ (noun), or ‘pertaining to a mixed lot of beasts’ (adjective).

QUESTIONS 1.

How would you describe the kind of objects that emerge from the window of the Mustang?

2.

What possibilities made the speaker in the poem ‘excited’ and ‘curious’?

3.

Are the speaker’s expectations met in the person he finally sees? Analyse this person’s appearance.

4.

What is the significance of the last stanza-but-one in the development of the poem?

5.

Comment on ‘the woman he was wearing’, ‘coupling with naked nothing’ and ‘world without places’. Is it possible to see the poem as an expression of the desire for androgyny?

6.

Analyse the changes in the speaker’s perceptions and preoccupations during the course of the poem.

_______________ From The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

RACE

16 Blackout Roger Mais Roger Mais (1905–1955) was born into a ‘brown’ middle class family in Kingston, Jamaica. He became a short story writer, journalist, poet, playwright, painter and novelist at a time when a writing career was unusual for any West Indian. His sympathy for the black underprivileged majority led him to join the freedom fighters during the workers’ protests and uprisings of 1938. He was imprisoned for six months for writing an anti-British satire Now We Know (1944). He published two collections of short stories in about 1940, And Most of all Man and Face and other Stories. His novels include The Hills were Joyful Together (1953), Brother Man (1954) and Black Lightning (1955). He died of cancer at the age of 49. ‘Blackout’ is set in a city on a West Indian island during the Second World War, and describes an encounter between a black West Indian man and an American girl. At that time American society was segregated with separate schools, buses and restaurants for blacks and whites. In the twenties and thirties the lynching of Negroes had been fairly common in the southern states of the USA. The city was in partial blackout; the street lights had not been turned on, because of the wartime policy of conserving electricity; and the houses behind their discreet aurelia hedges were wrapped in an atmosphere of exclusive respectability. The young woman waiting at the bus stop was not in the least nervous, in spite of the wave of panic that had been sweeping the city about bands of hooligans roaming the streets after dark and assaulting unprotected women. She was a sensible young woman to begin with, who realized that one good scream would be sufficient to bring a score of respectable suburban householders running to her assistance. On the other hand she was an American, and fully conscious of the tradition of American young women that they don’t scare easily. Even that slinking black shadow that seemed to be materializing out of the darkness at the other side of the street did not disconcert her. She was only slightly curious now that she observed that the shadow was approaching her, slowly. It was a young man dressed in conventional shirt and pants, and wearing a pair of canvas shoes. That was what lent the suggestion of slinking to his movements, because he went along noiselessly—that, and the mere suggestion of a stoop. He was very tall. There was a curious look of hunger and unrest about his eyes. But the thing that struck her immediately was the fact that he was black; the other particulars scarcely made any impression at all in comparison. In her country not every night a white woman could be nonchalantly approached by a black man. There was enough novelty in all this to intrigue her. She seemed to remember that any sort of adventure might be experienced in one of these tropical islands of the West Indies. ‘Could you give me a light, lady?’ the man said. It is true she was smoking, but she had only just lit this one from the stub of the cigarette she had thrown away. The fact was she had no matches. Would he believe her, she wondered? ‘I am sorry. I haven’t got a match.’ The young man looked into her face, seemed to hesitate an instant and said, his brow slightly wrinkled in perplexity: ‘But you are smoking.’

There was no argument against that. Still, she was not particular about giving him a light from the cigarette she was smoking. It may be stupid, but there was a suggestion of intimacy about such an act, simple as it was, that, call it what you may, she could not accept just like that. There was a moment’s hesitation on her part now, during which time the man’s steady gaze never left her face. There was pride and challenge in his look, curiously mingled with quiet amusement. She held out her cigarette toward him between two fingers. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you can light from that.’ In the act of bending his head to accept the proffered light, he came quite close to her. He did not seem to understand that she meant him to take the lighted cigarette from her hand. He just bent over her hand to light his. Presently he straightened up, inhaled a deep lungful of soothing smoke and exhaled again with satisfaction. She saw then that he was smoking the half of a cigarette, which had been clinched and saved for future consumption. ‘Thank you,’ said the man, politely; and was in the act of moving off when he noticed that instead of returning her cigarette to her lips she had casually, unthinkingly flicked it away. He observed this in the split part of a second that it took him to say those two words. It was almost a whole cigarette she had thrown away. She had been smoking it with evident enjoyment a moment before. He stood there looking at her, with cold speculation. In a way it unnerved her. Not that she was frightened. He seemed quite decent in his own way, and harmless; but he made her feel uncomfortable. If he had said something rude she would have preferred it. It would have been no more than she would have expected of him. But instead, this quiet contemptuous look. Yes, that was it. The thing began to take on definition in her mind. How dare he; the insolence! ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she said, because she felt she had to break the tension somehow. ‘I am sorry I made you waste a whole cigarette,’ he said. She laughed a little nervously. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, feeling a fool. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from, eh?’ he asked. ‘I suppose so.’ This won’t do, she thought, quickly. She had no intention of standing at a street corner jawing with—well, with a black man. There was something indecent about it. Why doesn’t he move on? As though he had read her thoughts he said: ‘This is the street, lady. It’s public.’ Well, anyway, she didn’t have to answer him. She could snub him quietly, the way she should have properly done from the start. ‘It’s a good thing you’re a woman,’ he said. ‘And if I were a man?’

‘As man to man maybe I’d give you something to think about,’ he said, still in that quiet, even voice. In America they lynch them for less than this, she thought. ‘This isn’t America,’ he said. ‘I can see you are an American. In this country there are only men and women. You’ll learn about it.’ She could only humour him. Find out what his ideas were about this question, anyway. It would be something to talk about back home. Suddenly she was intrigued. ‘So in this country there are only men and women, eh?’ ‘That’s right. So to speak there is only you an’ me, only there are hundreds and thousands of us. We seem to get along somehow without lynchings and burnings and all that.’ ‘Do you really think that all men are created equal?’ ‘It don’t seem to me there is any sense in that. The facts show it ain’t so. Look at you an’ me, for instance. But that isn’t to say you’re not a woman, the same way as I am a man. You see what I mean?’ ‘I can’t say I do.’ ‘You will though, if you stop here long enough.’ She threw a quick glance in his direction.’ The man laughed. ‘I don’t mean what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re not my type of woman. You don’t have anything to fear under that heading.’ ‘Oh!’ ‘You’re waiting for the bus, I take it. Well, that’s it coming now. Thanks for the light.’ ‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, with a nervous sort of giggle. He made no attempt to move along as the bus came up. He stood there quietly aloof, as though in the consciousness of a male strength and pride that was justly his. There was something about him that was at once challenging and disturbing. He had shaken her supreme confidence in some important sense. As the bus moved off she was conscious of his eyes’ quiet scrutiny, without the interruption of artificial barriers, in the sense of dispassionate appraisement, as between man and woman, any man, any woman. She fought resolutely against the very natural desire to turn her head and take a last look at him. Perhaps she was thinking about what the people on the bus might think. And perhaps it was just as well that she did not see him bend forward with that swift hungry movement, retrieving from the gutter the half-smoked cigarette she had thrown away.

NOTES Lynchings: The practice of killing, usually by hanging, members of racial minorities especially Negroes, without going through any judicial process to ascertain their crimes, if any. Historians have documented some 4,750 lynchings in the US between 1880 and 1960.

QUESTIONS 1.

The approach of the young man ‘intrigues’ the American girl. Why? What does this show of her character?

2.

Why does his request for a light cause some tension? Is the young man testing her?

3.

What changes his polite gratitude to ‘cold speculation’?

4.

Why does his quietness disturb her more than rudeness would have done?

5.

‘In this country there are only men and women?’ Does the young man mean that differences of class and race do not matter? Do the two characters in fact react to each other as ‘any man any woman,’ as suggested at the end of the story?

6.

The American girl has a typical racist attitude to the young man. Do you agree?

7.

‘There was something about him that was both challenging and disturbing. He had shaken her supreme confidence in some important sense.’ What had been the basis of her ‘supreme confidence’ and what in the young man gives him the power to shake it?

8.

How do the references to cigarettes function to structure the story?

9.

Analyse the ways in which race, class and gender affect the balance of power between the two people in the story.

_______________ From West Indian Stories. Edited by Andrew Salkey. London: Faber and Faber, 1960.

17 Telephone Conversation Wole Soyinka Wole Soyinka (1935-) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first black African to do so. He was born near Ibadan in Western Nigeria in 1935 and educated in Nigeria and at Leeds University in England. A leading figure in African drama, he founded the Orisun theatre company in 1964. Soyinka is a playwright, an actor and teacher of drama and literature as well as a poet and essayist. In 1975, he became Professor of Comparative Literature at Ife University in Nigeria in 1975 and Professor of African Studies and Theatre at Cornell University in 1988. He has been imprisoned more than once for his criticism of the Nigerian government. Some of his works were banned, and he has been forced to spend periods of exile abroad. During one of these, in 1997, the military regime passed a death sentence on him, which was afterwards revoked, enabling him to return to Nigeria in 1998. Soyinka’s plays range from comedy to tragedy and from political satire to the theatre of the absurd. Among his well-known plays are The Road (1965) and Death and the King’s Horsemen(1975). His poems include Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988). His autobiographical work, The Man Dies (1973) covers the period of his political imprisonment in Nigeria. Soyinka has also published a collection of essays Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976). The price seemed reasonable, location Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived Off premises. Nothing remained But self-confession. ‘Madam,’ I warned, ‘I hate a wasted journey—I am African.’ 5 Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came, Lipstick-coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder tipped. Caught I was, foully. ‘HOW DARK?’ … I had not misheard … ‘ARE YOU LIGHT 10

OR VERY DARK?’ Button B. Button A. Stench Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed By ill-mannered silence, surrender 15 Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification. Considerate she was, varying the emphasis— ‘ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?’ Revelation came. ‘You mean—like plain or milk chocolate?’ Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light 20 Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted, I chose. ‘West Africa sepia’—and as afterthought, ‘Down in my passport.’ Silence for spectroscopic Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent

Hard on the mouthpiece. ‘WHAT’S THAT?’ conceding 25 ‘DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.’ ‘Like brunette.’ ‘THAT’S DARK, ISN’T IT?’ ‘Not altogether. Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet Are a peroxide blonde. Friction, caused— 30 Foolishly madam—by sitting down, has turned My bottom raven black—One moment, madam’ sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap About my ears— ‘Madam,’ I pleaded, ‘wouldn’t you rather See for yourself?’ 35

NOTES Line 7. good-breeding: The polite manners expected of a person from an upperclass family. In England a person’s accent is often a strong indicator not only of social class but of dress, taste and habits. Lines 11–14. Public telephone booths in England used to be painted red, and the old-style ones required the user to push Buttons A and B to put in coins and make connections. Pillar boxes for posting mail, and buses, especially in London, are also red.

QUESTIONS 1.

What causes the first episode of silence in the poem? Why is the landlady’s good-breeding ‘pressurized’? What estimation of her does the poet make during her silence?

2.

In the second episode of silence, why is the speaker dumbfounded? What forces him to break the silence? What ‘surrender’ has taken place?

3.

The poet refers to the telephone booth as ‘public-hide and-speak.’ He mentions ‘self-confession.’ Do these two phrases indicate a feeling of shame or embarrassment?

4.

The writer describes his colour as ‘West African sepia.’ This silences the landlady. Why? Why does the writer produce so many fanciful names for shades of colours, like ‘milk chocolate’ and ‘peroxide blonde‘?

5.

How are the speaker’s feelings conveyed to us throughout the poem? How do we know he is stung by the landlady’s insensitivity?

6.

The speaker refuses to allow the landlady to exercise the advantage that her white skin gives her. Do you agree? Do you feel that he gains the upper hand by the end of the poem?

7.

‘Good-breeding,’ ‘Considerate she was,’ ‘One moment madam!’ Examine the phrases that refer to the polite manner employed by both speakers. Where is the politeness insincere? Where is it disturbed? Is politeness used as an effective weapon by either character—or both?

_______________ From Literature, Structure, Sound and Sense. Edited by L. Perrine & T.R. Arp. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983.

18 Harlem Langston Hughes Langston Hughes (1902–67) has been called the ‘Poet Laureate of the Negro Race’. He is associated with the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ of the early 20th century. When he had earned enough money from his writing he bought a house in Harlem, the black neighbourhood of New York, and lived there the rest of his life. He was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois and Ohio. He came from a poor but noted black family: his great-uncle, a well-known Black American of the 19th century, was a Congressman for Virginia and a founding Dean of the Law School of Howard University. In 1921, Hughes published an excellent poem called ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ He left home shortly afterwards and attended Columbia University for a year but despite doing well, preferred to leave and take up odd jobs including working on ships, which enabled him to see something of the world. Some years later he attended Lincoln University. Blues and jazz influenced him in the 1920s and his poem ‘The Weary Blues’ (1925) won a prize in Opportunity magazine. Hughes’ work was experimental and he was not afraid to describe elements of lower class culture and sexual mores, though this shocked some of his black readers. He said in 1926, We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame.’ In the 1930s Hughes was influenced by socialism. He wrote short stories and plays on the theme of racial oppression, such as Mulatto (1935), autobiographical works including The Big Sea(1940) and several volumes of verse, one of which was called Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). He also produced a novel, a newspaper column featuring a character called Simple, books for children, and the libretto for Street Scene, a Broadway musical. He is representative of the growing confidence of Black writing during this period and at the same time a very original writer. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a soreAnd then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar overLike a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

1951, 1959

QUESTIONS 1.

What ‘dream’ might the writer have in mind, given that he calls his poem ‘Harlem’?

2.

Two images he uses are of rottenness and disease, two are of sweetness. Do these imply different courses taken by those who find their dream deferred?

3.

What do the last two images of sagging and exploding imply?

4.

This poem is full of questions. Is it significant that they have no answers?

5.

Examine how alliteration and rhyme contribute to the effect of this poem.

_______________ From Selected Poems. New York: Random House, and also Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Edited by H.L. Gates, Nellie Y. Mckay. New York and London: Norton, 1997.

19 Still I Rise Maya Angelou Maya Angelou (1928–) was born Marguerite Johnson in St Louis, Missouri. Her parents separated and she was brought up in Arkansas by her grandmother. At the age of eight she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and she went and reported it. Subsequently the rapist was killed, possibly by Maya’s uncles. Traumatized by this and by the sense that her words had had such a powerful impact, Maya refused to speak for five years. She read books instead and with a neighbour’s encouragement, developed a great love of language, and by reciting literature regained her will to speak. Another formative incident was the refusal of a dentist to treat her for a tooth abscess, because he would not touch a black person’s mouth. The American South was then a racially segregated society with separate schools and other facilities like medical care. She remembers, ‘It was awful to be a Negro and have no control over my life.’ Maya once lived for a month with homeless people in a junkyard after a fight with her father’s girlfriend. She became a mother at sixteen, as the result of a casual sexual experience, just after leaving school. Her grandmother’s strength of character in the face of racism, sexism and the poverty of the Depression impressed Maya, who refused to let her early experiences defeat her. She became a playwright, actress, dancer, memoirist, singer, civil rights activist, and America’s most visible public poet. She is the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Her attitude to life is summed up in her words: ‘All my work is meant to say “You may encounter defeats but you must not be defeated.” In fact the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.’ Maya Angelou has written five autobiographical works, including I Know why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and The Heart of a Woman(1981), two volumes of essays and five volumes of poetry. Among these are And Still I Rise(1978) and The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou which was published in 1994. She says of her work: ‘I write for the Black voice and any ear which can hear it.’ You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.

5

10

Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own back yard.

15

20

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

25

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

30

35

QUESTIONS 1.

The writer addresses ‘You’ several times in the poem. Who is meant by ‘You’, and how can we tell?’

2.

‘I’ve got oil wells,’ ‘I’ve got gold mines,’ ‘I’ve got diamonds.’ What is the effect of the repetition here and the particular images used?

3.

In some of the other similes the speaker compares herself to moons, suns and other natural phenomena. What do you think she means to convey by such images?

4.

What do you understand by ‘the huts of history’s shame’?

5.

What are the inherited ‘gifts’ that the writer brings with her?

6.

This poem has an emphatic rhythm, to which alliteration and repetition give extra force. Find some examples. At what point(s) in the poem does the rhythm seem to change? Where do short lines come in? Can you suggest a reason for these variations?

7.

It is hard to miss the energy of this poem. What devices of language contribute to this impression of energy?

8.

Compare this poem with some of the other texts on the theme of oppression. In what ways is it different?

9.

As a black and as a woman, Maya Angelou has a personal experience of oppression. Does she write in a different way from writers who are not members of oppressed groups but sympathetic to them? Discuss with reference to writers of this section and/or the sections on Caste and Gender.

_______________ From Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Edited by H.L. Gates and Nellie Y. Mckay. New York and London: Norton, 1997.

20 Jump Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, is a white South African writer who has chosen not to exile herself from the country of her birth. Her mother was English and her father a Jew, and she was born in Springs near Johannesburg. Gordimer’s first volume of short stories, Face to Face was published in 1949. Her wellknown works include The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974, My Son’s Story (1990) and Jump and Other Stories (1991). She published a collection of her major essays in The Essential Gesture in 1988. Nadine Gordimer is a remarkable and versatile short story writer and her story ‘Jump’ is one of the best examples of her work. Set in Africa, it is the story of an unnamed white man who joins other whites in suppressing black Africans and then betrays the cause when apartheid comes to an end. Both a ‘hero’ and a ‘criminal’, the story is about the initiation into manhood, about lost causes, about the bitter taste of betrayal and guilt. As Gordimer herself states, ‘A story occurs, in the imaginative sense. To write one is to try to express from a situation in the exterior or interior world the life-giving drop—sweat, tear, semen, saliva—that will spread an intensity on the page, burn a hole in it.’ In its imaginative rendering of a lost soul caught in the forces of history he hardly comprehends, ‘Jump’ is exactly that. Gordimer’s writing shows how the individual of whatever colour is inescapably affected by these splintered political and social conditions. Her stories explore themes of sexuality, racial politics, and cultural identity and experiment with different narrative perspectives including the use of black narrators. He is aware of himself in the room, behind the apartment door, at the end of a corridor, within the spaces of this destination that has the name HOTEL LEBUVU in gilt mosaic where he was brought in. The vast lobby where a plastic upholstered sofa and matching easy chairs are stranded, the waiting elevator in its shaft that goes up floor after floor past empty halls, gleaming signs—CONFERENCE CENTRE, TROPICANA BUFFET, THE MERMAID BAR—he is aware of being finally reached within all this as in a film a series of dissolves passes the camera through walls to find a single figure, the hero, the criminal. Himself. The curtains are open upon the dark, at night. When he gets up in the morning he closes them. By now they are on fire with the sun. The day pressing to enter. But his back is turned; he is an echo in the chamber of what was once the hotel. The chair faces the wide-screen television set they must have installed when they decided where to put him. There is nothing to match its expensive finish—the small deal table and four chairs with hard red plastic-covered seats, the hairy two-division sofa, the Formica-topped stool, the burning curtains whose circles and blotches of pattern dazzle like the flicker of flames: these would be standard for a clientele of transients who spend a night, spill beer, and put out cigarettes under a heel. The silvery convex of the TV screen reflects a dim, ballooned vision of a face, pale and full. He forgets, and passes a hand over cheek and chin, but there is no beard there—it’s real that he shaved it off. And they gave him money to fit himself out with the clothes he wears now. The beard (it was dark and vigorous, unlike the fine hair of his head) and the camouflage fatigues tucked into boots that struck authoritatively with each step, the leatherbound beret; took them all off, divested himself of them. There! He must be believed, he was

believed. The face pale and sloping away into the pale flesh of the chin: his hidden self produced for them. It’s there on the dead screen when he looks up. They supplied a cassette player of good quality as well as the wide-screen television set. He is playing, so loudly it fills the room, presses counter to the day pressing against the curtains, the music track from a film about an American soldier who becomes brutalized by the atrocities he is forced to commit in Vietnam. He saw the film long ago, doesn’t remember it well, and does not visualize its images. He is not listening: the swell and clash, the tympani of’conflict, the brass of glory, the chords of thrilling resolve, the maudlin strings of regret, the pauses of disgust—they come from inside him. They flow from him and he sits on and does not meet the image smeared on the screen. Now and then he sees his hand. It never matched the beard, the fatigues, the beret, the orders it signed. It is a slim while, hairless hand, almost transparent over fragile bones, as the skeleton of a gecko can be seen within its ghostly skin. The knuckles are delicately pink—clean, clean hand, scrubbed and scrubbed—but along the V between first and second fingers there is the shit-coloured stain of nicotine where the cigarette burns down. They were prepared to spend foreign currency on him. They still supply from somewhere the imported brand he prefers; packets are stacked up amply in their cellophane, within reach. And he can dial room service as indicated on the telephone that stands on the floor, and, after a long wait, someone will come and bring cold beer. He was offered whisky, anything he liked, at the beginning, and he ordered it although he had never been one to drink spirits, had made the choice, in his profession, of commanding the respect accorded the superiorly disciplined personality rather than the kind admiringly given to the hard-living swaggerer. The whisky has stopped coming; when he orders a bottle nothing is said but it is not delivered. As if it mattered. Covered by the volume of the music, there is the silence. Nothing said about the house: the deal included a house, he was given to understand it would be one of the fine ones left behind and expropriated by the State in the name of the people, when the colonials fled. A house with a garden and watchman for privacy, security (in his circumstances), one of the houses he used to ride past when he was the schoolboy son of a civil servant living here in a less affluent white quarter. A house and a car. Eventually some sort of decent position. Rehabilitated. He had thought of information, public relations (with his international experience); it was too soon to say, but they didn’t say no. Everything he wanted: that was to be his reward. The television crews came—not merely the tinpot African ones but the BBC, CBS, Antenne 2, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen—and the foreign correspondents flew in with their tape recorders. He was produced at press conferences in the company of the Commander of the Armed Forces, the Mnister of Defence, and their aides elegant as the overthrown colonial ones had been. A flower arrangement among the water carafes. Him displayed in his provided clothes, his thighs that had been imposing in fatigues too fleshy when crossed in slightly shiny tropical trousers, his chin while, soft and naked where the beard was gone, his hair barbered neat and flat with the dun fringe above the forehead, clippers run up the nape—on his big hunched body he saw in the newspaper photographs the head of a little boy with round bewildered eyes under brows drawn together and raised. He told his story. For the first few months he told his story again and again, in performance. Everyone has heard it, now. On the table with the four chairs drawn up a cold fried egg waits on a plate covered by another plate. A jug of hot water has grown tepid beside a tin of instant coffee. Someone has brought these things and gone away. Everyone has gone away. The soaring, billowing music in the room is the accompaniment the performance never had. When the tape has ended he depresses the rewind button to play it again. They never mention the house or the car and he doesn’t know how to bring up the subject—they hardly ever come to see him any more, but maybe that’s natural because the debriefing is over, they’re satisfied. There’s nothing more to tell the television crews and the press. There’s nothing more he can think of—think back! think back!—to find to say. They’ve heard about his childhood in this capital, this country to which he has been returned. That he was an ordinary colonial child

of parents who’d come out from Europe to find a better life where it was warm and there were opportunities. That it was warm and there was the sea and tropical fruit, blacks to dig and haul, but the opportunity was nothing grander than the assured tenure of a white man in the lower ranks of the civil service. His parents were not interested in politics, never. They were not interested in the blacks. They didn’t think the blacks would ever affect their lives and his. When the colonial war began it was away in the North; troops came from the ‘mother’ country to deal with it. The boy would perhaps become an accountant, certainly something one rung above his father, because each generation must better itself, as they had done by emigrating. He grew up taking for granted the activities and outlets for adventurous play that had no place in the reality of the blacks’ lives, the blacks’ war: as an adolescent he bonded with his peers through joining the parachute club, and he jumped—the rite of passage into manhood. In the capital, the revolution was achieved overnight by a relinquishment of power by Europe, exacted by the indigenous people through years of war in the rural areas. A few statues toppled in the capital’s square and some shops were looted in revenge for exploitation. His parents judged their security by the uninterrupted continuance, at first, of the things that mattered to them: the garbage continued to be collected twice a week and there was fish in the market. Their modest lives would surely not be touched by black rule. He was apprenticed as draughtsman to an architect by then (more prestigious than accountancy) and his weekend hobby, in addition to jumping from the sky, was photography. He even made a bit of pocket money by selling amusing shots of animals and birds to a local paper. Then came the event that—all at once, reeled up as the tape is filling its left cylinder on rewind—the experience that explained everything he had ever done since, everything that he was to confess to, everything he was to inculpate himself for and judge himself on in his performance for the journalists under the monitoring approval of the Commander of the Armed Forces and the Minister of Defence, during the probing of debriefing, the Q and A interviews; and to himself, in fiery dimness behind the curtains’ embers, facing the fish-eye of the TV screen, surrounded by the music, alone. He took a photograph of a sea-bird alighting on some sort of tower structure. Soldiers lumbered with sawn-off machine guns seized him, smashed his camera and took him to the police. He was detained for five weeks in a dirty cell the colonial regime had used for blacks. His parents were told he was an imperialist spy— their innocent boy only two years out of school! Of course, this was all in the confusion of the first days of freedom (he would explain to his audience), it was to be expected. And who was that boy to think he could photograph anything he liked, a military installation of interest to the new State’s enemies? That white boy. At this point in the telling came the confession that for the first time in his life he thought about blacks—and hated them. They had smashed his camera and locked him up like a black and he hated them and their government and everything they might do, whether it was good or bad. No—he had not then believed they could ever do anything good for the country where he was born. He was sought out by or he sought out—he was never made to be clear on this small point— white people to whom his parents had successfully appealed to get him released. They soothed him with their indignation over what had happened to him and gave him a substitute for the comradeship of the parachute club (closed down by the blacks’ military security) in their secret organization to restore white rule through compliant black proxies. How it was to be done was not yet formulated, allies from neighbouring cold and hot wars had not yet been found, money from international interests wanting access to oil and mineral finds had not been supplied, sources for matériel and mercenaries to put together a rebel army in the bush were still to be investigated. He bent quietly over his drawing board and at night he went to clandestine meetings. He felt importantly patriotic; something new, because his parents had abandoned their country, and this country in which he was born had been taken back by the blacks for themselves. His parents thanked God he was safe in good company, white like them but well off and knowledgeable about how to go on living here where it was warm, trusted to advise one if it were to be time to leave. They were proud when told their son was being sent to Europe to study; an act of philanthropy by compatriots of the country they had all once emigrated from. Of humble beginnings, he had come into the patrimony of counter-revolution.

The telephone is not only good for house calls that summon the old black man shrunken in khaki who brings the beer, brought the egg and covered it with a second plate. He can phone long distance every day, if he wants to. There is never a bill; they pay. That was the condition understood—they would provide everything. So he phones his mother every third day in the European city to which she and his father returned when the people who knew about these things said it was time to go. He has only to dial, and it’s winter there now and the phone will ring on its crocheted mat in the living-room behind double-glazing, discovered to him (so that was where his parents came from!) when he was set up in the same European city. They must have realized soon that he was not studying. At least not in the sense they would understand, of attending an institute and, qualifying for a profession you could name. But it was obvious to them he was doing well, he was highly-thought-of by the people who had recognized the young man’s qualities and taken him up after the terrible time when those blacks threw him in prison back where everything was lost, now—the civil servant’s pension, the mangoes and passion fruit, the sun. He was involved in the affairs of those people of substance, international business too complicated for him to explain. And confidential. They respected that. A mother and father must never make any move that might jeopardize the opportunities they themselves have not been able to provide. He was always on his way to or from the airport—France, Germany, Switzerland, and other destinations he did not specify. Of course his gift for languages must have been invaluable to the people he worked with rather than for—that was clearly his status. He had not an apartment but a whole house purchased for him in the privacy of one of the best quarters, and his study or office there was not only lined with documents and books but equipped with the latest forms of telecommunication. Foreign associates came to stay; he had a full-time maid, His delicate, adolescent’s chin disappeared in the soft flesh of good living, and then he grew the beard that came out dark and vigorous giving him the aspect of a man of power. They never saw him wearing the rest of its attributes: the bulky fatigues and the boots and the beret. He visited them in civilian clothes that had come to be his disguise. The first time he ever used the phone on the floor was when he phoned her, his mother, to tell her he was alive and here. Where? How could she ever have supposed it—back, back in this country! The sun, the mangoes (that day there was fruit supplied on the table where the egg congeals, now), the prison a young boy had been thrown into like any black. She wept because she and his father had thought he was dead. He had disappeared two months previously. Without a word; that was one of the conditions he adhered to on his side, he couldn’t tell his parents this was not a business trip from which he would return: he was giving up the house, the maid, the first-class air tickets, the important visitors, the book-lined room with the telecommunications system by which was planned the blowing up of trains, the mining of roads, and the massacre of sleeping villagers back there where he was born. It is the day to phone her. It’s more and more difficult to keep up the obligation. There’s nothing left to tell her, either. From weeping gratitude that he was alive, as time has gone by she has come to ask why she should be punished in this way, why he should have got mixed up in something that ended so badly. Over the phone she says, Are you all right? He asks after his father’s health. Does it look like being a mild winter? Already the wind from the mountains has brought a touch of rheumatism. Do you need anything? (Money is provided for him to send to his parents, deprived of their pension; that’s part of the deal.) Then there’s nothing to say. She doesn’t ask if he’s suffering from the heat back there, although the sun banks up its fire in the closed curtains, although she knows well enough what the climate’s like in summer, and he was gone seven years and cannot reacclimatize. She doesn’t want to mention the heat because that is to admit he is back there, she and his father will never

understand what it was all about, his life; why he got himself into the fine house, the telecommunications system, the international connections, or why he gave it all up. She says little, in a listless voice, over the phone. But she writes. They deliver her letters, pushed under the door. Why does God punish me? What have your father and I done? It all started long ago. We were too soft with you. With that parachute nonsense. We should never have allowed it. Giving in, letting you run wild with those boys. It started to go wrong then, we should have seen you were going to make a mess of our lives, I don’t know why. You had to go jumping from up there. Do you know what I felt, seeing you fall like that, enjoying yourself frightening us to death while you fooled around with killing yourself’? We should have known it. Where it would end. Why did you have to be like that? Why? Why? First in the weeks of debriefing and then in the press conferences, he had to say. They demanded again and again. It was their right. How could you associate yourself with the murderous horde that bums down hospitals, cuts off the ears of villagers, blows up trains full of innocent workers going home to their huts, rapes children and forces women at gunpoint to kill their husbands and eat their flesh? He sat there before them sane, and was confronted by the madness. As he sits in the red gloom in front of the wide-screen television set, the fuse of a cigarette between the fingers of his fine white hand and his pale blue eyes clear under puppy-like brows. Shuddering; they couldn’t see it but he shuddered within every time to hear listed by them what he knew had happened. How could they come out with it, just like that? Because horror comes slowly. It takes weeks and months, trickling, growing, mounting, rolling, swelling from the taxed codes of operation, the triumph of arms deals secretly concluded with countries who publicly condemn such transactions; from the word ‘destabilization’ with its image of some faulty piece of mechanism to be rocked from its base so that a sound structure may be put in its place. He sent the fax, he took the flights to campaign for support from multinational companies interested in access to the oil and minerals the blacks were giving to their rivals, he canvassed Foreign Offices interested in that other term, spheres of influence. In the fine house where an antique clock played an air over the sudden stutterings of communications installations, the war was intelligence, the miracle of receiving the voice of a general thousands of kilometres away, on the other continent, down there in the bush. When he travelled on his European missions he himself was that fighting man: the beard, the fatigues, the beret. The people he visited saw him as straight from the universal battlefield of Right and Left; the accout-rements transformed him for himself, so it seemed he was emerged from that generic destiny known as the field of operations. You mean to say you didn’t know? But nobody talked. A push was achieved or it wasn’t. A miniature flag moved on the map. Men lost, and losses imposed on the government forces were recorded. There were some reverses. A huge airlift of supplies and matériel by the neighbouring African state allied in the cause of destabilization was successful; the rebel force would fight on for years, village by village, bridge by bridge, power stations and strategic roads gained on the map. There would be victory on the righteous side. Nobody said how it was being done. The black govemment spread reports of massacres because it was losing, and of course the leftist and liberal press took up the tales. Intelligence, tuned to the clock with its gilded cupids, filed these: under disinformation about destabilization. Here, always, they waited for him to go on. He swallowed continually between phrases, and while he was telling they would watch him swallow. The cold egg won’t go down. There is a thin

streamer of minute ants who come up six floors through the empty foyer and the closed reception rooms and find their way along the leg of the table to food left there; he knows. And telling, telling—telling over and over to himself, now that no one comes to ask any more, he swallows, while the ants come steadily. Go on, go on. It wasn’t until I went to the neighbouring State—it is a white state and very advanced—that provided the matériel, planes, intelligence supplied by its agents to the communiclations centre it set up for us in the house in Europe. There was also a base. Go on. A training base for our people. It was secret, no one knew it was there. Hidden in a game reserve. I was very confident—pleased—to find myself sent not only around Europe, but chosen to go to that State. To liaise. To meet the Commander of National Security and Special Services there. See for myself the important extent of co-operation in our mutual dedication to the cause. Report back on the rnorale of our men being trained there in the use of advanced weapons and strategy. Yes? A crescendo comes in great waves from the speaker provided with the tape player: to win the war, stabilize by destabilization, set up a regime of peace and justice! During press conferences, at this point an ooze of heat would rise under his skin. Their eyes on him drew it up from his tissues like a blister. And then? There’s no one in the room, the curtains are closed against everyone. Swallow. I saw the male refugees captured at the border brought in starving. I saw how to deal with them. They were made to join our forces or were put back over the border to die. I could see that they would die. Their villages burned, their, families hacked to death-you saw in their faces and bodies how it really happened… the disinformation. It wasn’t talked about at that base, either. Our allies, at the dinners they gave—game dishes and wine, everything of the best provided, treated like a VIP— they didn’t talk about these things. Well… I was shown around … everything. The secret radio station that broadcast the Voice of our organization. The latest weapons made available to us. The boots and uniforms made in their factories. (That outfit of mine must have come from there.) The planes taking off at night to fly our men, armed and equipped to do what they were trained to do. I knew, now, what that was. Yes? Of course, it was war… So? …War isn’t pretty. There is brutality on both sides. I had to understand. Tried to. But planes also came back from over the border at night. Not empty. They carried what I thought were refugee children to be saved from the fighting; girls of twelve or thirteen, terrified, they had to be pulled apart from each other to get them to walk. They were brought in for the men who were receiving their military training. Men who had been without women; to satisfy them. After dinner, the Commander offered me one. He had one led in for himself. He took off her clothes to show me. So, yes, I knew what happened to those girl children. I knew that our army had become—maybe always was—yes, what you say, a murderous horde that burned hospitals, cut off the ears of villagers, raped, blew up trains full of workers. Brought to devastation this country where I was born. It’s there, only the glowing curtains keep it out. At night, when the curtains are drawn back it is still there in the dark with the blind bulk of buildings, the traces of broken boulevards and decayed squares marked in feeble lights. Familiar to me, can’t say I don’t know it, can’t say it

doesn’t recognize me. It is there, with the sun pressing against the window, a population become beggars living in the streets, camping out in what used to be our—white people’s—apartments, no electricity, no water in the tiled bathrooms, no glass in the windows, and on the fine balconies facing the sea where we used to take our aperitifs, those little open fires where they cook their scraps of food. And that’s the end. But it’s gone over again and again. No end. It’s only the tape that ends. Can’t be explained how someone begins really to know. Instead of having intelligence by fax and satellite. Back in the room in Europe with its telecommunications there was on record the whereabouts of this black regime’s representatives abroad. One day he went there. In the rebel army’s outfit, with the beard, so that they could shoot him if they wanted; so that they would realize who he was and what he knew. Not the atrocities. Something else; all that he could offer to efface his knowledge of the atrocities: complete information about the rebel army, its leaders, its internal feuds, its allies, its sources of supply, the exact position and function of its secret bases. Everything. Everything he was and had been, right back to the jump with the parachute and the photograph of the tower. They didn’t shoot. They kept him under guard so that the people from the telecommunications headquarters in the room with the antique clock would not kill him before he could tell. They handled him carefully; himself a strange and rare species, kept captured for study. They were aware of its worth, to them. Debriefing is like destabilization, the term doesn’t describe the method and experience. Day by day, divested of the boots, fatigues, the beret and the beard, first-class flights, the house in Europe, the dinners of honour, the prestige of intelligence—his life. He has been discovered there beneath it, sitting quite still on a chair in a dark room, only a naked full neck pulsating. In the silence after the tape ends it is possible to think there is the distinct sound of ants moving in an unwavering path. They knew they couldn’t have it for nothing—his life. They haven’t provided the house with a garden that was part of the deal. Or the car. Of course, he can go out. Go where he likes, it was only for the first six months that he was restricted. Once they know they can trust him, he’s not of interest to them any longer. Nothing more, now, to lead them to. Once he’s told everything, once he’s been displayed, what use is he to them? They are right. Perhaps they will never come to him again. The girl emerges from the bedroom, she sleeps late. There is a girl. They didn’t supply her. But they might have; she was there in the waiting room when he went under surveillance to a doctor. He politely let her take her turn with the doctor first, and when she came out they got talking. I don’t see how I’m ever supposed to follow this diet, she said, what can you buy if you haven’t got foreign currency—you know how it is, living here. Yes—for the first time he saw it was so: he lives here. Perhaps it was possible for him to get what she needed? She didn’t ask questions; access to foreign currency is not a subject to be discussed. The girl’s been in the bedroom all morning, just as if there was no one there. Now the dim room prolongs her lassitude, no break between night and day. Pink feet with hammer toes drag over the floor; she makes tasting sounds with her tongue against her palate. She takes a deep breath, holds then expels it; because he doesn’t speak. So you don’t want to eat?

She has lifted the covering plate and touches the yellow mound of the yolk with her forefinger; the congealed surface dents shinily. She wipes her finger on the T-shirt that is her nightgown. A sprig of houseplant she brought and put in a glass, one day, is on the table where she set it down then; in the cloudy water, the darkened room, it has sent out one frail, floating thread of root. Ants are wavering at the rim of the glass. The thin buttermilk smell of her fluids and his semen comes to him as she bends to follow the ants’ trail from the floor. After he had finished with her, last night, she said: You don’t love me. He was assailed by the sight of the twelve-year-old child and the Commander. Then she heard something she couldn’t believe. The man weeping. She drew away in fear and repugnance to the side of the bed. She hangs about the room behind him, this morning, knowing he’s not going to speak. Why don’t we go to the beach. Let’s have a swim. I’d love to go and eat some prawns. We can take a bus. There’s a good place… it’s cheap. And don’t you feel like a swim, I’m dying to get into the water… come on. She waits patiently. Has he shaken his head—there was some slight movement. There is nothing in the room she can turn to as a pretext to keep her there, waiting to see if he accepts her forgiveness, her humble understanding of her function. After a few minutes she goes back into the bedroom and comes out dressed. I’m going. (Qualifies:) Going for a swim. This time he nods and leans to take a cigarette. She hasn’t opened the door yet. She’s hesitating, as if she thinks she ought to make some gesture, doesn’t know what, might come over and touch his hair. She’s gone. After the inhalation of the cigarette has become his breath and body, he gets up and goes to the window. He pulls aside the curtains to left and right. They are parched and faded, burned out. And now he is exposed: there is the bright stare of the beggared city, city turned inside out, no shelter there for life, the old men propped against empty facades to die, the orphaned children running in packs round the rubbish dumps, the men without ears and women with a stump where there was an arm, their clamour rising at him, rising six floors in the sun. He can’t go out because they are all around him, the people. Jump. The stunning blow of the earth as it came up to flexed knees, the parachute sinking silken. He stands, and then backs into the room. Not now; not yet.

QUESTIONS 1.

The story ‘Jump’ is set in an unnamed African country. How does the writer paint the turbulent political climate of that country?

2.

‘Jump’ is a story of the rites of passage into manhood by parachute and betrayal. Comment.

3.

The parents of the protagonist in the story are typical white settlers in Africa. How are they portrayed?

4.

The betrayal of the protagonist is made with expectations of ‘rehabilitation.’ Comment on the use of irony in the story when reality clashes with expectations.

5.

In his confession, the protagonist reveals, unconsciously, the reason why he is both ‘hero’ and ‘criminal.’ Do you see the reason why?

6.

Comment on the narrative technique of the story.

7.

Comment on the significance of the title.

_______________ From Jump and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

VIOLENCE AND WAR

21 Return from the Somme Siegfried Sassoon Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) went to Clare College, Cambridge, and enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers when he was twenty-eight. He was a courageous if rather rash soldier and received the Military Cross for bravery a day before the Battle of the Somme. However, his experiences in the trenches in France taught him to despise the jingoism of war leaders and the ‘callous complacence’ of those at home while he developed a great compassion for his comrades. Wounded in 1917, he was sent to convalesce in England where he decided to defy military discipline and speak out publicly against the war: ‘I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest… I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust…’.* This ‘wilful defiance’ would have led to a court-martial but for the influence of Robert Graves, the poet, who also served in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. The army decided to regard Sassoon as suffering from shell-shock and sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh where he was treated by the noted Dr W.H.R. Rivers and where he met the young poet Wilfred Owen. Sassoon encouraged Owen’s writing and ensured the publication of his poetry after his untimely death. A sense of responsibility towards his fellow-soldiers sent Sassoon back into the army until he was invalided out July 1918. Two volumes of poems belong to the war years, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). After the war he published a series of six semi-fictional autobiographies in which he recounted his life. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress(1936) are the best known. Sassoon’s diaries were published in 1981 and 1983. This prose extract, ‘Return from the Somme’ is from the second volume of his memoirs. It describes the return of the soldiers from the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front in France in 1916. The Division had now been in action for a week. Next day they were to be relieved. Late in the afternoon Dottrell moved the transport back about three miles, to a hill above Dernancourt. Thankful for something to do at last, I busied myself with the putting up of tents. When that was done I watched the sun going down in glory beyond the main road to Amiens. The horizon trees were dark blue against the glare, and the dust of the road floated in wreaths; motor-lorries crept continuously by, while the long shadows of trees made a sort of mirage on the golden haze of the dust. The country along the river swarmed with camps, but the lower sun made it all seem pleasant and peaceful. After nightfall the landscape glowed and glinted with camp-fires, and a red half-moon appeared to bless the combatant armies with neutral beams. Then we were told to shift the tents higher up the hill and I became active again; for the battalion was expected about midnight. After this little emergency scramble I went down to the crossroads with Dottrell, and there we waited hour after hour. The Quartermaster was in a state of subdued anxiety, for he’d been unable to get up to Battalion Headquarters for the last two days. We sat among some barley on the bank above the road, and as time passed we conversed companionably, keeping ourselves awake with an occasional drop of rum from his flask. I always enjoyed being with Dottrell, and that night the husky-voiced old campaigner was more eloquent than he realized. In the simplicity of his talk there was a universal tone which seemed to be summing up all the enduring experience of an Infantry Division. For him it was a big thing for the Battalion to be coming back from a battle, though, as he said, it was a new Battalion every few months now.

An hour before dawn the road was still an empty picture of moonlight. The distant gun-fire had crashed and rumbled all night, muffled and terrific with immense flashes, like waves of some tumult of water rolling along the horizon. Now there came an interval of silence in which I heard a horse neigh, shrill and scared and lonely. Then the procession of returning troops began. The camp-fires were burning low when the grinding jolting column lumbered back. The field guns came first, with nodding men sitting stiffly on weary horses, followed by wagons and limbers and field-kitchens. After this rumble of wheels came the infantry, shambling, limping, straggling and out of step. If anyone spoke it was only a muttered word, and the mounted officers rode as if asleep. The men had carried their emergency water in petrol-cans, against which bayonets made a hollow clink; except for the shuffling of feet, this was the only sound. Thus, with an almost spectral appearance, the lurching brown figures flitted past with slung rifles and heads bent forward under basin helmets. Moonlight and dawn began to mingle, and I could see the barley swaying indolently against the sky. A train groaned along the river side sending up a cloud of whitish fiery smoke against the gloom of the trees. The Flintshire Fusiliers were a long time arriving. On the hill behind us the kite balloon swayed slowly upward with straining ropes, its looming bulbous body reflecting the first pallor of daybreak. Then as if answering our expectancy, a remote skirling of bagpipes began and the Gordon Highlandershobbled in. But we had been sitting at the crossroads nearly six hours, and faces were recognizable, when Dottrell hailed our leading Company. Soon they had dispersed and settled down on the hillside, and were asleep in the daylight which made everything seem ordinary. None the less I had seen something that night which overawed me. It was all in the day’s work—an exhausted Division returning from the Somme Offensive— but for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts. It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.

NOTES Quartermaster: Regimental officer in charge of arranging quarters and food for the troops. Division: group of army brigades or regiments. Battalion: large body of troops ready for battle; a sub-division of a regiment. Limber: detachable front part of a gun carriage. Flintshire Fusiliers: The name used for the Royal Welsh (or Welch) Fusiliers in Sassoon’s semi-fictional account. The Royal Welsh Fusiliers sent 42 battalions to the First World War. Gordon Highlanders: This is the real name of a famous regiment that lost 29,000 officers; men killed, wounded or missing in the War. The Second Battalion took part in the Battle of the Somme, losing two-thirds of its officers and half its men in three days of ‘successful’fighting.

QUESTIONS 1.

What is the function of the description of the natural world in the first two paragraphs? Is it intended to convey Sassoon’s feelings on war?

2.

In the third paragraph, how does the writer bring about the contrast between the world of men and the world of nature? Why are the moonbeams ‘neutral’?

3.

Sassoon uses the phrase ‘shambling, limping, straggling,’ to describe the Infantry’s progress. List five other words that describe various kinds of movement.

4.

What kinds of sounds punctuate the silence of the moonlit night on which the army returns? How do these sounds contribute to the profound impression that the scene makes on Sassoon? In particular, how does Sassoon’s descriptive technique convince us that he has seen ‘an army of ghosts’?

5.

Could we categorize this passage as a protest against war?

_______________ Extract from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, the second part of The Complete Memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon edited by George Sherston (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).

22 Dulce et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) is one of the finest poets to emerge out of World War I. Born near Oswestry he was educated locally at Shrewsbury Technical School and the Birkenhead Institute. He tried but failed to get a scholarship to go to London University. After working briefly as a teacher he joined the Artists’ Rifles in 1915, and despite his pacifist views, he fought in France from January 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. Severely concussed from a shell explosion in the Somme in the summer of 1917, he spent several days in a bomb crater with the mangled remains of a fellow officer. This traumatic experience resulted in ‘shell shock,’ and he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh to recover. There he met Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves who both encouraged his poetry. Many of his most important poems, including ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Strange Meeting’ date from these months but only five were printed while Owen was alive. Sassoon arranged for the publication of Owen’s Collected Poems in 1920. Under Sassoon’s influence, Owen replaced the rather stylized diction of his youthful verse with a more direct and colloquial style better suited for the horrors of modern war. Yet his poems retain a musical quality that comes from his use of rhyme and his experiments with assonance and halfrhyme (as in ‘escaped/scooped’). His poetry expresses with savage bitterness the cruelty and horror he saw in the battlefield. As he wrote in the preface to a projected volume of his poetry, ‘My subject is war and the pity of war poetry is in the pity’. Owen returned to the Front in August 1918 and was soon awarded the Military Cross for bravery. He was killed on 4th November, seven days before the Armistice was signed. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, originally addressed to a patriotic lady poet, is one of his anti-war poems in which he rejects the idea that a soldier’s death should be glorified as heroic. The description of the ragged group of soldiers facing attack from gas-shells subverts traditional ideas of martial glory and heroism. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, 5 But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys:—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 10 But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire of lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in this face,

15

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

20

25

NOTES Dulce et Decorum est: the title and the last two lines of the poem are taken from an ode of the famous Roman poet Horace (65–8 Bc): ‘It is pleasant and proper to die for one’s country.’ Line 8. gas-shells: poisonous and corrosive chemical vapours were used for the first time against humans in 1915. Line 10. clumsy helmets: gas-masks. Line12. lime: quick-lime, which is caustic. Line13. misty panes and thick greenish light: The gas masks were provided with eyepieces of greenish glass. Line 20. like a devil’s sick of sin: terrible as the face of a devil tortured by a sense of sin. The irony that underlies the comparison is that unlike Satan, the soldier has committed no sin and his suffering is undeserved. Lines 25–26. The poet sarcastically addresses politicians and journalists who sit in the comfort of their homes and exhort soldiers on the battlefield to lay down their lives in the cause of patriotism.

QESTIONS 1.

Do you notice any similarities between Owen’s description of the soldiers and Sassoon’s?

2.

How does the poet explore the horror of a young soldier’s death? Comment on the dream images that the poet uses.

3.

In the beginning of the poem the writer uses ‘we,’ then ‘I’ and finally ‘you’. What is the significance of these shifts? Does the use of ‘my friend’ make the reader, along with the politicians, complicit in glorifying war?

4.

Owen offered his readers the shocking truth rather than the beauty they expected from poetry. But is there any unexpected beauty in his poem? Compare his poem with the passage from Sassoon on this point.

5.

Do you agree that the ironic use of Horace helps the poet to reject the ideas of heroism and patriotism? How does Owen ensure that Horace’s words seem bitterly ironic?

_______________ From The War Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1994.

23 Conscientious Objector Edna St Vincent Millay Edna St Vincent Millay was born in 1882. Considered the most famous poet of the Jazz Age, and known for her bohemian lifestyle, she was an accomplished playwright and speaker who toured often to give readings of her poetry. She studied at Vassar College and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her collection The Harp Weaver and Other Poems. Having seen World War I, Millay published poems in the interwar years with a political aim: raising American consciousness of the magnitude and implication ofwar. The Buck in the Snow (1928) and Wine from These Grapes (1934) contain many of her anti-war poems. Millay died in 1950. ‘Conscientious Objector’ was written in 1917 during World War I, and was published in the collection Wine from These Grapes. It is a poem that describes the poet’s unwillingness to abet death while acknowledging its inevitability. The poem is also a remarkable anthem to the poet’s pacifist ideas, as well as a passionate affirmation of life. The quiet yet caustic lines make this poem memorable. I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor. He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning. 5 But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth. And he may mount by himself; I will not give him a leg up. Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran. With his hoof on my breast, I will not-tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp. I shall die, but that is all that shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll. 15

10

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either. Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man’s door. Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death? 20 Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

NOTES Conscientious Objector: A term that describes a person who, for moral or religious reasons, thinks it is wrong to wage war and therefore refuses to serve in any branch of the armed forces. Lines 4–5. business in Cuba… in the Balkans: Death follows in the footsteps of war. Cuba and the Balkans were places of civil strife, where American foreign policy had great interest. Line 13. the black boy hides in the swamp:Millay recollects America’s past history of slavery. The torture of thousands of black men and women forms the history of this violent past.

QUESTIONS 1.

How is Death personified in the first stanza of the poem?

2.

What is the significance of the title ‘Conscientious Objector’?

3.

In what ways could the speaker ‘deliver men to death’?

4.

Whom do you think the writer is addressing when she says ‘Brother’, and what does she mean by ‘our city’?

5.

Do you feel that the poet and the ‘I’ of the poem are one and the same? In what ways does Millay assert her essential humanity?

_______________ From In a Dark Time. Edited by Nicholas Humphrey and Robert Jay Lifton, London: Faber and Faber, 1984.

24 Naming of Parts Henry Reed Henry Reed (1914–1986) was born in Birmingham. He was a teacher and journalist before the war and afterwards a radio broadcaster and playwright with the BBC. One of the great formative influences on his career as a writer was his experience in World War II when he served in the British army, mainly as a Japanese translator. ‘Naming of Parts,’ ‘Judging Distances’ and ‘Unarmed Combat’ came out under the heading ‘Lessons of War’ in a volume of poetry called A Map of Verona (1946). ‘Naming of Parts’ is one of the best poems to have come out of World War II. The incongruity and insanity of war is suggested in the poem through the juxtaposition of two voices—while the army instructor tries to hammer home his dull lessons, the young recruit notes the springtime bursting out all over, the flowers in the garden and the bees buzzing over them. The poem’s ironic and humorous tone is seen in the way the recruit uses the names of the rifle parts to make telling puns, especially on the word ‘spring.’

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica 5 Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens, And today we have naming of parts. This is the lower sling swivel. And this Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see, When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, Which in your case you have not got. The branches 10 Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures, Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy 15 If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it 20 Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

25

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt, And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance, Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards For today we have naming of parts. 30

QUESTIONS 1.

What realities are contrasted in the poem? How do we see the contrast between life and death, between interior and exterior?

2.

What is the significance of the season of the year in relation to the poet’s thoughts on war and technology?

3.

Compare the use of natural images in this poem with Sassoon’s use of the landscape in the prose piece ‘Return from the Somme.’

4.

In what ways does Owen’s poem (written in World War I) differ from Reed’s poem which belongs to World War II? Other than their common theme, war and ‘the pity of war,’ do they share any characteristics in terms of style and perspective?

_______________ From A Map of Verona. London: Jonathan Cape,1946.

25 General, Your Tank Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht was born in Germany in 1898. He was a political activist as well as a playwright and poet, and directed many of his own plays. Hitler banned his books and plays, so, like many intellectuals, he left Germany in 1933 during the height of Hitler’s power. Brecht spent the years 1941–47 in America, where he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 to answer charges of spreading ‘Red’ ideas, but managed to bore his interrogators with a long lecture on ancient Japanese theatre and was let off. After the war Brecht settled in East Germany, travelling to Moscow to receive the Stalin Prize in 1955. He died in East Berlin in 1956. Though he is best known for his plays like Mother Courage and her Children (1941), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945) and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), rather than for his poetry, his poems are also remarkable for their range and subject-matter. He first started publishing poetry in 1926, and his 1939 collection, written during years of exile in Denmark, contain some of the best known poems, including his most significant personal statement, a poem called ‘Those Born after Us’. Brecht’s power as a poet lies in his simplicity and directness, in his bold use of hackneyed words in uncommon contexts. To him the poet was a craftsman serving the community, a man among men, speaking of humanity. Brecht’s concern was for the soldier not the generals or the nation. Once he was asked who were the best soldiers in the world, and picked the Russians and the Italians, which surprised everybody as the Italians were famous for running away at every opportunity. He replied that they knew for whom and for what they had been sent into battle. For him the best soldiers were the soldiers who could think. ‘General, Your Tank’ is from Brecht’s ‘A German War Primer.’ In its short pithy statements Brecht manages to convey the idea that war, not humanity, is ultimately powerless. Like all his works, this poem too conveys his deep and abiding faith in mankind.

GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men But it has one defect: It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful 5 It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful He can fly and he can kill

10

But he has one defect: He can think.

QUESTIONS 1.

Compare Brecht’s poem to Millay’s and suggest ways in which they share a common outlook on war.

2.

In subject matter, both Brecht and Millay choose the human figure as an emblem of political resistance to war. Comment.

_______________ From Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose. Poems 1913–1956. Edited by J.Willett and R. Manheim. London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.

26 The Dog of Tetwal Sa’adat Hasan Manto Sa’adat Hasan Manto (1912–55) was born in Samrala, in Punjab and educated in Amritsar and Aligarh. From 1941, he worked in Delhi at the All India Radio, when he wrote a number of radio plays. Two years later, Manto shifted to Bombay, writing screenplays for films and meeting other writers like Ismat Chughtai, Sardar Jafri and Krishan Chander. After the Partition, he decided to migrate to Lahore in 1948 where he was to die seven years later, fighting poverty and depression. His short stories, parables of the horror and violence of Partition, have been widely read and translated, among which are the classics like ‘Thanda Gosht’, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, and ‘Khol Do.’ His other writings have been collected in a volume called Black Margins (1984 edn). ‘The Dog of Tetwal’ was first published in Urdu, during Manto’s lifetime. It is a remarkable, though often neglected story and is an ironic comment on the division between the people of Pakistan and India as a legacy of Partition. Like the protagonist of the story ‘Toba Tek Singh,’ the dog too is the helpless victim of events too bewildering for it to understand. The soldiers of both sides, who befriend it and then shoot it in jest, seem to personify the senseless animosity that smoulders beneath the surface of the lives of communities. The victim of this ire is always the innocent, the ‘martyr’ who dies ‘a dog’s death.’ The two sides had not budged from their positions for several days now. Occasional bursts of firing—about ten or twelve rounds in a day—were to be heard, but never the sound of human shrieks. The weather was pleasant; the wind wafted across, spreading the scent of wild flowers. Oblivious to the battle on the peaks and slopes, nature was immersed in its necessary work—the birds chirped as before, the flowers continued to bloom, and lazy honeybearing bees sleepily sipped nectar in the old, time honoured way. Each time a shot echoed in the hills, the chirping birds would cry out in alarm and fly up, as though someone had struck a wrong note on an instrument, and shocked their hearing. September-end was meeting the beginning of October in roseate hue. It seemed that winter and summer were negotiating peace with one another. Thin light clouds like fluffed-up cotton sailed in the blue sky, as if out on an excursion in their white shikaras. For several days now, the soldiers on both sides of the mountain posts had been restless, as no decisive action was taking place. Lying in their positions, they would get bored, and then attempt to recite sh’ers to one another. If no one listened, they would hum to themselves. They remained lying down on their stomachs or backs on the rocky ground, and when the order came, let off a round or two. The two sides were entrenched in rather safe positions. The high-velocity bullets crashed against the shields of stone and fell to the ground. The two mountains on which the forces were ranged were of about the same height. Between them was a green valley—a rivulet wriggling like a fat snake on its chest. There was no danger of air raids. Neither side possessed artillery. Therefore fires would be lit without fear or danger, and smoke from fires on both sides would rise and mingle in the air. At night, it was absolutely quiet. The soldiers on both sides could hear bursts of laughter from the other. Once in a while, entering into this spirit, a soldier would begin to sing, and his voice would

awaken the silence of the night. The echoes would then reverberate, and it would seem that the mountains were repeating what they had just heard. One round of tea had just been taken. The pine coals in the stone chulhas had grown cold. The sky was clear. There was a chill in the air. The wind had ceased to carry the scent of flowers, as though they had shut up their vial of perfume for the night. However, the sweat of the pines, their resin, left an odour in the air which was not wholly unpleasant. Everybody slept wrapped in their blankets, but in such a way, that in a single movement they could arise, ready for battle. Jamadar Harnam Singh was on guard. When his Rascope watch showed that it was two o’clock, he woke Ganda Singh and told him to take station. He wanted to sleep, but when he lay down he found sleep a distant proposition, as distant as the stars in the sky. Jamadar Harnam Singh lay on his back, and gazing up at the stars, began to hum: Bring me a pair of shoes, studded with stars Studded with stars O Harnam Singh O Yaara Even if you have to sell your buffalo.

Harnam Singh saw star-studded shoes scattered all over the sky, all a-twinkle. I will bring you shoes, studded with stars Studded with stars O Harnam Kaur O Lady, even if I have to sell my buffalo. He smiled as the song came to an end, and realizing that he would not be able to sleep, he rose and woke up everybody else. The thought of his beloved had made him restless. He wished for some nonsensical chatter that would recreate the mood of the beloved in the song. They did begin to talk, but in a desultory fashion. Banta Singh, the youngest, and the one with the best voice, went and sat on one side. The rest, though yawning all the while, kept gossiping about trivial but entertaining matters. After a while, suddenly, Banta Singh began singing Heer’ in a melancholic voice. Heer said, the jogi lied, no one placates a hurt lover. I have found no one; grown weary, looking for the one who calls back the departed lover. A falcon has lost the kunj to the crow-see, does it remain silent or weep? Happy talk and stories to entertain the world are not for the suffering one. After a pause he began singing Ranjha’s reply to Heer’s words: The falcon that lost the kunj to the crow has, thank god, been annihilated. His condition is like the fakir who gave away his all, and was left with nothing. Be contented, feel the pain less and God will be your witness. Renouncing the world and donning the garb of

sorrow, Saiyed Waris has become Waris Shah. Just as abruptly as Banta Singh had begun to sing, he fell silent. It appeared as if the soil-tinted mountains too had taken on the mantle of grief. After a while, Jamadar Harnam Singh let out a mighty oath at an imaginary object, then lay down. Suddenly, in the melancholy stillness of the last quarter of the night, the barking of a dog began to resound. Everyone was startled. The sound did not come from too far off. Jamadar Harman Singh sat up and said, ‘From where has this barking one come?’ The dog barked again. Now the sound was much closer. After a few moments there was a rustling in the bushes. Banta Singh rose and moved towards the bushes. When he returned, he had with him a stray dog, its tail wagging. He smiled, ‘Jamadar sahab, when I asked him, he said, I am Chapad Jhunjhun.’ Everyone laughed. Jamadar Harnam Singh addressed the dog affectionately, ‘Come here, Chapad Jhunjhun.’ The dog approached Harnam Singh, wagging its tail. It began sniffing the stones on the ground, in the belief that some food had been thrown there. Jamadar Harnam Singh reached into his bag, took out a biscuit and threw it in his direction. The dog sniffed at the biscuit and opened its mouth. But Harnam Singh leapt at it and picked it up, ‘Wait … He could be a Pakistani.’ Everybody laughed at this. Banta Singh came forward, stroked the dog on its back, and said to Jamadar Harnam Singh, ‘No, Jamadar sahab, Chapad Jhunjhun is a Hindustani.’ Jamadar Harnam Singh laughed, and looking at the dog, said, ‘Oye, show me the identification!’ The dog wagged its tail. Harnam Singh laughed heartily, ‘This is no identification … All dogs wag their tails.’ Banta Singh caught the dog’s trembling tail. ‘The poor thing is a refugee!’ Jamadar Harnam Singh threw down the biscuit, and the dog immediately pounced on it. Digging up the ground with the heel of his boot, one of the soldiers said, ‘Now, even dogs will have to be either Hindustani or Pakistani!’ The Jamadar took out another biscuit from his bag and threw it towards the dog, ‘Like the Pakistanis, Pakistani dogs too will be shot.’ ‘Hindustan Zindabad!’ Another soldier loudly raised the slogan. The dog which had just begun to move forward to pickup the biscuit, suddenly grew frightened and backed off with its tail between its legs. Harnam Singh laughed, ‘Why do you fear our slogan, Chapad Jhunjhun … Eat … Here, take another biscuit!’ And so saying he took another biscuit out and threw it.

The soldiers talked on and soon it was morning. In the blink of an eye, just as when one presses a button and the electricity generates light, the sun’s rays flooded the mountainous region of Tetwal. The battle had been raging in that area for some time. Dozens of lives of soldiers would be lost for each mountain, and even then the hold of either side was tenuous. If they held the range today, tomorrow their enemies did; the following day they captured it back, and the day after that, their enemies did so. Jamadar Harnam Singh picked up his binoculars and surveyed the surrounding area—smoke was rising from the mountain in front. This meant that a fire was being stoked there too, tea was being readied, and the thought of breakfast was on the mind; undoubtedly, the other side too could see smoke rising from their camp. At breakfast, each soldier gave a little to the dog, which it ate with gusto. Everyone was taking a keen interest in the dog, as if they wanted to make it a friend. Its arrival had brought with it an element of cheerfulness. From time to time, each one would affectionately address it as Chapad Jhunjhun and cuddle it. On the other side, in the Pakistani camp, Subedar Himmat Khan was twirling his impressive moustaches—which had many a story in its past—and was carefully studying the map of Tetwal. With him sat the wireless operator, who was taking orders from the Platoon Commander for Subedar Himmat Khan. At some distance, Bashir, leaning against a rock, was holding his gun and softly humming: Where did you spend the night, my love. Where did you spend.… As Bashir swung into the mood and raised his pitch, he heard Subedar Himmat Khan’s stern admonition, ‘Oye, where were you last night?’ When Bashir’s inquiring gaze shifted towards Himmat Khan, he saw him looking elsewhere, ‘Tell me, oye!… Bashir turned to see what Himmat was looking at. The same stray dog, which, a few days earlier, had come to their camp like an uninvited guest and stayed on, was back, sitting a little distance away. Bashir smiled, and turning to the dog, began, Where did you spend the night, my love. Where did you …

The dog began wagging its tail vigorously, sweeping the rocky ground around him. Subedar Himmat Khan picked up a pebble and threw it at the dog, ‘Saala knows nothing except how to wag his tail.’ All of a sudden Bashir looked carefully at the dog. ‘What’s this around his neck?’ He started walking towards the dog, but even before he reached it, another soldier took off the rope tied around its neck. A piece of cardboard with something written on it was strung to it. Subedar

Himmat Khan took the piece of cardboard and asked the soldiers, ‘Does any one of you know how to read this?’ Bashir came forward and picked up the cardboard piece and said, ‘Yes I can read a bit.’ With great difficulty he spelled out ‘Cha-p-Chapad-Jhun-Jhun… Chapad Jhunjhun’ What’s this?’ Subedar Himmat Khan twirled his legendary long moustaches vigorously, ‘It must be some word, some…’ Then he asked, ‘Bashir, is there anything else written there …?’ Bashir, immersed in deciphering the writing, replied, ‘Yes, there is. This is a Hindustani dog.’ Subedar Himmat Khan began thinking aloud, ‘What does this mean? What was it you read?… Chapad …?’ Bashir then answered, ‘Chapad Jhunjhun!’ One soldier spoke as if with great knowledge, ‘Whatever the matter is, it lies here.’ Subedar Himmat Khan thought this appropriate. Yes, it does seem so!’ Bashir read the text inscribed on the cardboard once more, ‘Chapad Jhunjhun. This is a Hindustani dog.’ Subedar Himmat Khan took up the wireless set and placing the headphones firmly over his ears, personally spoke to the Platoon Commander about the dog—how it had first come to them and stayed for several days, and how one night, it disappeared from their midst. Now that it had returned, there was a rope tied around its neck with a cardboard piece strung on it, on which was written . . : and this message he repeated three or four times to the Platoon Commander, ‘Chapad Jhunjhun. This is a Hindustani dog.’ But they too could not come to any conclusion. Bashir sat on one side with the dog, speaking lovingly and harshly by turns, and asked it where it had disappeared for the night, who had tied the rope and the cardboard around its neck. But, he did not get the answer he desired. When questioned, the dog would just wag its tail in answer. Finally, in anger, Bashir caught it and gave it and gave it a violent shake. The dog whined in pain. Having spoken on the wireless set, Subedar Himmat Khan contemplated the map of Tetwal for some time. He then rose in a decisive manner. Tearing off the top of a cigarette packet, he handed it over to Bashir, ‘Here, Bashir, scribble on this in the same creepy-crawly Gurmukhi, as they have.’ Bashir took the piece of the cigarette packet and asked, ‘What should I write, Subedar Sahab?’ Subedar Himmat Khan twirled his moustaches and reflected, ‘Write … just write.’ He took out a pencil from his pocket. Giving it to Bashir, he asked, ‘What should we write?’ Bashir passed the pencil tip between his lips and began thinking. Suddenly, in a contemplative, questioning tone he asked ‘Sapar Sunsun …?’ Then, satisfied, said in a determined way, ‘Okay, the answer to Chapad Jhunjhun can only be Sapar Sunsun. They will remember their mothers, these Sikhras!’ Bashir put the pencil to the top of the cigarette pack, ‘Sapar Sunsun.’ ‘One, hundred per cent … write Sa-pa-r-Sunsun!’ Subedar Khan laughed loudly. And write further … This is a Pakistani

Subedar Himmat Khan took the cardboard piece from Bashir’s hand, made a hole in it with the pencil, and after stringing the rope through it, moved towards the dog, ‘Take this to your offspring!’ All the soldiers laughed at this. Subedar Himmat Khan tied the rope around the dog’s neck. The dog kept wagging its tail all the while. The Subedar then gave it something to eat, and in a didactic manner, said, ‘Look friend, don’t commit treachery … Remember, the punishment for a traitor is death.’ The dog kept wagging its tail … After it had eaten its fill, Subedar Himmat Khan picked up the rope and led it towards the sole trail on the hill and said ‘Go, deliver our letter to our enemies … But make sure you come back. This is the command of your officer, understand?’ The dog, still wagging its tail, began walking ever so slowly, along the trail that took a winding route into the lap of the mountains. Subedar Himmat Khan took up his gun, and fired once into the air. The shot and its echo were heard on the other side, at the Hindustani camp, but they could not fathom its meaning. For some reason, Jamadar Harnam Singh had been grumpy that day, and the sound of the shot made him even more irritable. He gave the order to fire. Consequently, for the next half hour a futile rain of bullets poured from either side. Eventually sated of the diversion, Jamadar Harnam Singh called a halt to the firing and began combing his beard with greater ferocity. Having done that, he methodically bundled his hair into the net and asked Banta Singh, ‘Oye, Banta Singh, tell me, where has Chapad Jhunjhun gone? The ghee didn’t go down well with the dog.’ Banta Singh missed the implication of the idiom and said, ‘But we didn’t feed him any ghee.’ Jamadar Harnani Singh laughed boisterously, ‘Oye, ill-read lout, there is no use talking to you.’ Meanwhile, the soldier on watch, who was scanning the horizon with his binoculars, suddenly shouted, ‘There, he’s coming …’ Everybody looked up. Jamadar Harnam Singh said asked, ‘What was the name again?’ The soldier on duty, ‘Chapad Jhunjhun … Who else!’ ‘Chapad Jhunjhun?’ Jamadar Harnam Singh got up. What is he doing?’ The soldier answered, ‘He’s coming have.’ Jamadar Harnam Singh took the binoculars from the soldier and began looking around. ‘He’s coming our way. The rope is tied around his neck … but he’s coming from there … the enemy camp …’ He let out a great oath at the dog’s mother, raised the gun, aimed and fired. The shot was off its mark. The bullet hit a short distance away from the dog, causing the stones to fly up, and buried itself in the ground. The dog, fearful, stopped.

On the other side, Subedar Himmat Khan saw through the binoculars that the dog was standing on the path. Another shot and the dog started running the opposite way. It ran, with its tail between its legs, towards Subedar Himmat Khan’s camp. Himmat Khan called out loudly, ‘The brave are never afraid … Go back!’ And he fired a shot to scare the dog. The dog stopped again. From the other side, Jamadar Harnam Singh fired his gun. The bullet whizzed by, past the dog’s ear. The dog jumped and flapped its ears violently. From his position, Subedar Himmat Khan fired his second shot that buried itself near the front paws of the dog. Frightened out of its wits, it ran about—sometimes in one direction, sometimes the other. Its fear gave both Subedar Himmat Khan and Jamadar Harnam Singh, in their respective places, a great deal of pleasure and they began guffawing. When the dog began running in his direction, Jamadar Harnam Singh, in a state of great fury, uttered a terrible oath, took careful aim and fired. The bullet struck the dog in the leg and its cry pierced the sky. The dog changed its direction and limping, began running towards Subedar Himmat Khan’s camp. Now the shot came from this side—just to scare it. While firing Himmat Khan shouted, ‘The brave pay no attention to wounds. Put your life on the line … go back …’ Terrified, the dog turned the other way—one of its legs had become useless. It had just about managed to drag itself a few steps in the other direction on three legs, when Jamadar Harnam Singh aimed and fired. The dog fell dead on the spot. Subedar Himmat Khan expressed regret, ‘Tch tch … the poor thing became a martyr!’ Jamadar Harnam Singh took the warm barrel of the gun in his hand and said, ‘He died a dog’s death.’

NOTES Sh’ers: couplets Heer: Waris Shah composed his version of the Heer Ranjha legend around 1766. This story is about Dhido Ranjha, who belonged to a family of Muslim Jats. After being dispossessed of his share in his family property, he goes to work as a cowherd in a Rajput family that had converted to Islam, to which Heer Sayal belonged. The tragic story of their love forms the basis of Waris Shah’s verse romance, part of the common corpus of popular Punjabi culture, equally beloved of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. kunj: grove, arbour or bower. annihilated: in the sense of achieving nirvana, the extinction of individuality and release from karma. fakir: ascetic, religious mendicant.

Shah: ‘royal,’ a title taken by fakirs

QUESTIONS 1.

Comment on the way nature is described at the start of the story.

27 A Chronicle of the Peacocks Intizar Husain Intizar Husain is widely regarded as the most important short story writer in Urdu since Sa’adat Hasan Manto. He was born in Dibai, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, in 1925. After Partition he migrated to Pakistan in late 1947 and settled in Lahore. His best known novel is Basti(1979). His stories are widely read and translated in India. Husain draws on the rich narratives of Buddhist and Hindu mythology to reflect upon tradition and modern life, power and violence and the failure of reason. Husain has often been quoted as saying that he wanders between Karbala and Ayodhya and the Shia in him sits beside the Hindu. ‘Morenama’ or ‘A Chronicle of the Peacocks’ was written in 1999. The essential experience that the story recounts is that of hijrat, migration, a journey of the protagonist through landscapes at once familiar and alien. Many voices join in this travel; predominant among these are the peacocks, which are exiles too. Myths and parables from the Mahabharata, the Jatakas and Shia lore abound in the story. The polarity of the ancient and the modern is also an important aspect of it. In the backdrop is the question of war that reduces humans to puppets. Allah alone knows why this evil spirit is after me! I am shocked and upset. I had actually gone there to inquire after the well-being of the peacocks. How was I to know that this evil spirit would grab hold of me? It was by chance that I came across that small news item; otherwise, in the midst of all that turmoil, I would never have found out what had really happened. Tucked away in the middle of the terrifying news about India’s atomic bomb was a small note about how the explosion had so frightened the peacocks of Rajasthan that they had flown up screaming into the sky and scattered in all directions. Immediately, I wrote a column expressing my sympathy for the peacocks, and thought that, having done my duty, I was free from all further obligations. But had I really done my duty? Was I actually free? That insignificant piece of information disturbed me in the same way as that small fish had disturbed Manuji. Manuji had once caught a fish no longer than his little finger and had placed it in a pot. He, too, had thought he had done his duty and was free. But the fish started to grow and grow. It became so big that he had to take it out of the pot and release it into a lake, and then take it out of the lake and release it into a river. The fish, however, became too large for the river, and Manuji had to carry it to the sea. In the same way a news item, which journalists thought deserved no more than two lines, overwhelmed my imagination. The news reminded me of the peacocks I had seen in Jaipur. Subhan Allah, what a beautifullyplanned pink city it was! I reached Jaipur late in the afternoon. At first, I did not sense their presence. But, in the evening, when I opened the window of the guest house, which was as lovely as a new bride, the view outside was breathtaking. Everywhere I looked—in the courtyard, on the parapet around the fountain, over the balconies—there were peacocks; peacocks and more peacocks; peacocks with bright blue tails! They had a quiet dignity and a royal grace and a calm elegance. I felt as if I were in the very cradle of beauty, love and peace. The next evening, as I was about to leave the city, I saw peacocks on every tree, rock and hill. Their movements had the same peace, the same grace and the same beauty. As the evening shadows deepened, the air was filled with the song of peacocks. I thought they were there to both welcome and bid me farewell.

Whenever I recall that trip, my mind is filled with the images of those peacocks. I am surprised. Did I really see so many of them? Did the peacocks of Rajasthan actually come out to greet me? I wonder how they are now. I try to imagine that city now, but all I can see is a picture of desolation. Shocked and disturbed, I am neither able to see the peacocks nor hear their song. Where have they all disappeared? In which corner of the world are they hiding? Suddenly, I have a vision of a lonely peacock on a distant hill. He seems battered and bruised. I walk quickly toward him but, before I can reach the hill, he rises into the sky screaming with terror and disappears. Where has he gone? Where are his companions, those countless peacocks? Why is he sitting alone on that hill, the very picture of desolation? Why is he so despondent, so terrified? The sight of that dejected, bewildered peacock suddenly brings to mind another image of desolation that I had forgotten. On the far edge of a dark, oil-soaked sea, I see a forlorn duck covered with foul effluents, watching the waves in disbelief. Till yesterday the sea was ambrosia, today it is poison. The wings of the duck are so heavy with slime that he can no longer fly. Poison flows though the veins in his body. The weary bird is a symbol of the horrors of the war between the United States and Iraq. It is sad to see a bird in so much pain. The poor duck seemed to have taken upon himself all the crimes human beings commit against each other—Saddam Hussein against his countrymen, the Iraqis against the Kuwaitis and the Americans against the Iraqis. It is strange that whenever apocalypse is at hand, the rich and the powerful rarely ever pay for their sins: instead, the poor and weak take upon themselves the burden of suffering so as to redeem their times. The duck is symbolic of those prophets who, according to all religious texts, think of suffering as a sacred duty. At that time, I didn’t recognize the duck as a symbol of our times. I lacked the visionary insight to see that he had the grace of a prophet. It never occurred to me to write a story about him. I forgot about him completely. He was only a poor, small duck, and not a gorgeous peacock about whom I am so anxious to write a story now. What if he had been a royal swan instead of a mere duck? But there are no royal swans in the world now. Once upon a time, it was difficult to decide whether the royal swan or the peacock was the king of the universe. In those days, royal swans used to swim in lakes that were as translucent as white pearls. And princesses used to scatter pearls across palace courtyards to tempt their swan-lovers. In our, times, there are no swan-lovers who can be seduced by pearls. Nor are there any royal swans that swim in the shimmering waters of Mansarovar. Now, no one even knows where Mansarovar is. The lakes are dry, the rivers polluted and the air thick with the dust and smoke of bombs. The royal swans have flown away in search of clear air and pure water. They exist only in the world of fables and myths. Only the poor ducks and geese have been left behind to bear the burden of our times. Till recently, the peacock, in all his grandeur, was a link between the past and the present. When the monsoon breeze cooled the evening, the song of the peacock used to fill the air. I remember that once a peacock came and sat on the parapet of our terrace. I quickly ran up to the terrace, tip-toed along the wall, and was about to grab its tail, when a shudder ran through his body and he flapped his wings nervously and flew away. ‘You should never trouble a peacock, son. He is the bird of paradise,’ Dadima reprimanded me. ‘The bird of paradise?’ I asked in wonder. What is he doing here?’ ‘He is paying for his mistake.’ ‘What did he do to be so punished?’ ‘O my son, he is innocent, but he got trapped in the wiles of that wretch, Satan.’ ‘How did he get trapped in the wiles of Satan?’

‘That wretch disguised himself as an old man and went to the gates of paradise. He pleaded with the gatekeepers to let him in. But the gatekeepers saw through his disguise and recognized that the old man was Satan himself. So they refused to open the gates. A peacock, who was sitting on the wall surrounding the garden of paradise, felt sorry for the old man. He flew down to him and said, ‘Bade Mian, I’ll help you across the wall.’ Well, what does a blind man need but the guidance of someone who can see? Satan jumped onto the peacock’s back at once. The peacock flew over the wall of paradise and helped Satan enter the Garden of Eden. When Allah Mian found out, He was very angry. When He exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, He also asked the peacock to get out.’ I was upset when I heard the story and felt sorry for the peacock. Once upon a time, he used to sit on the wall of paradise, and now he sits on the wall of our terrace. When I told Dadima this, she replied, Yes, son, that is what happens when we are exiled from our own courtyards. Now, all he can do is find something to sit on—any wall around any courtyard—or any tree or hill where he can find a foothold.’ When I walked through Sravasthi, I saw a peacock sitting on a green hill lost in thought. It seemed as if he was waiting for someone. I had reached Sravasthi late in the afternoon. Mahatma Buddha had lived there a long time ago. vihara where he used to stay with his monks during the monsoons is now in ruins. Only a few scattered bricks mark its place. The peacock on the hill was, perhaps, the last of the survivors from the days of the Buddha and still carried images of those days in his eyes. Due to the presence of that one peacock, Sravasthi seemed a place of great tranquillity. I didn’t stay long in Sravasthi. I had to get back to Delhi. But, that evening, Delhi was a sad and desolate city. At least, the basti around Nizamuddin was. Only a few days earlier, a caravan of migrants, whose homes had been looted, had left the area. On that rainy day, it seemed as if the silence and the gloom would never lift. Even Nizamuddin’s tomb, in the middle of an unpaved courtyard, looked dismal. The tomb was surrounded by tall grass. As I walked through it, I heard a peacock call from somewhere behind the tomb. When I turned around to look, I couldn’t see him, but I heard him call once more. It was a strange call, resonant of millenniums past. As my imagination moved further down the ages, I was once again startled by the call of peacocks. ‘Ya Moulla, where are those peacocks, in which garden?’ Surprised, I walked a little further, and found myself in a city whose outer walls touched the clouds. Beyond the walls were orchards filled with a variety of fruits. The garden echoed with the music of birds of different hues. Two notes were more distinct than the others—the whistle of the koel and the call of the peacock … Arrey, this is Indraprastha, the city of the Pandavas! Have I really travelled so far from home? I must get back. I have travelled far and long. I have seen peacocks—peacocks from different ages and lands. I have heard their song. Now, it is time for me to write my Morenama—my Chronicle of the Peacocks. But, before I go back home, I must make another trip to Rajasthan and find out if the peacocks that had flown away in fear have returned. The peacocks had actually returned in great numbers. Strangely, the moment they saw me, they were so terrified that, screaming in terror, they rose from the hills and trees and scattered in the sky. At that moment, I sensed that I wasn’t alone. Someone else was walking beside me. When I looked to my left, I was so shocked by what I saw that I couldn’t turn my gaze away … What! Is that Ashwatthama, the great criminal of Kurukshetra? Why is he here? Why is he walking beside me? … I don’t know when he attached himself to me. Perhaps, he began to follow me when, on my way back from Indraprastha, I stopped at Kurukshetra. Yes, I am sure this evil creature attached himself to me there. But Kurukshetra was desolate. I had seen no living being there. Where had he been hiding? Had he been wandering there ever since the war? War transforms man utterly. Take Ashwatthama, the son of Dronacharya. Dronacharya was a man of such profound learning that all the great warriors of the Pandavas and the Kauravas used

to bow down to him and touch his feet. Ashwatthama, his son, had inherited many of his father’s qualities, but he didn’t have his wisdom. He was the most damned and accursed man of that war. It is said that Dronacharya, guru of all the great warriors, possessed the most dreaded of weapons, the Brahmastra. In appearance, it was no different from a blade of grass, but its power was so great that it could reduce everything to ash; destroy all living things far and wide in an instant. Dronacharya had passed on the secret of that weapon only to his favourite disciple, Arjuna. War is so awful that in Kurukshetra, the teacher and his disciple found themselves in opposing camps fighting each other. Both, however, had taken a vow never to use the Brahmastra because it would destroy the whole world. Before his death, Dronacharya revealed the secret of the Brahmastra to his son, Ashwatthama, but warned him sternly never to use it. After Dronacharya was killed there was no one left to restrain Ashwatthama. So, during the last days of the war, he decided to stake everything and release the Brahmastra. The last days of war are always the most fearful. They are dangerous and unpredictable. During those days, men are tempted to use weapons that are only meant to threaten. It doesn’t matter then if a city like Hiroshimaburns; at least the fighting comes to an end. The victors are satisfied; the defeated are lost in their sorrow. At Kurukshetra, it was Ashwatthama who acted foolishly and used the Brahmastra. When Shri Krishna heard what Ashwatthama had done, he said to Arjuna, ‘O Janardhan, Dronacharya’s foolish son has released the Brahmastra. Now, all living things will be destroyed. Only you can counter that weapon. Act quickly before everything is reduced to ashes.’ Arjuna took out his Brahmastra and released it to neutralize Ashwatthama’s weapon. It is said, that when Arjuna released the Brahmastra, the fire was so intense that its flames singed all the three worlds. Its heat even scorched the distant forest where Vyasa Rishi sat in meditation. He was terrified. He abandoned his meditations at once, went to Kurukshetra, stood between Ashwatthama and Arjuna, and raising both hands, shouted, ‘O evil ones, what great injustice is this! The entire world will be destroyed. Recall your weapons.’ Arjuna touched the feet of the great soul, and at once recalled his weapon. But Ashwatthama was unrepentant, ‘Maharaj, I have released the weapon, but I don’t have the power to take it back. All I can do is change its direction. So, instead of falling on the Pandava army, it will fall on their women, strike their wombs and destroy their foetuses. The Pandavas shall have no heirs and their clan shall come to an end.’ Then Shri Krishna said angrily, ‘O son of Dronacharya, you are a great sinner. By killing children you have committed a great crime. I curse you to wander alone in the forests for three thousand years. May your wounds never heal, may pus and blood flow from them always, may they stink so much that people everywhere run away from you in disgust.’ Even I wanted to run away from him as far as possible, but he clung to me like a shadow … Ya Allah, where can I hide; how can I get rid of him? … I suddenly remembered that Meerabai’s samadhi was also nearby. I wondered if I should seek shelter there. Then, it occurred to me that the dargah of Khwaja Moin-ud-din Chishti was also in the same vicinity. If I could find it, I would easily get rid of this evil spirit. Who would let him enter the dargah? Other thoughts raced through my mind. But I didn’t know how to cast him off. No matter what path I took, he followed me like a shadow. Peacocks screamed with fear on one side; women of the Pandavas wept on the other. There was mourning in every home. In every family, a child had died. There was calamity even in Arjuna’s house. Subhadra was crying bitterly. The Kauravas at Kurukshetra had killed Abhimanyu, the son

born from her womb. She had mourned for him. She had hoped that Abhimanyu’s wife, Uttara, would give birth to a son and ensure the survival of the Pandava lineage. But Ashwatthama’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Uttara collapsed after giving birth to a stillborn child. There were no celebrations in any other Pandava household either. The Brahmastra had rendered the wombs of all their women barren. Subhadra remembered the promise her brother had made to her. Shri Krishna had promised, ‘Sister, I shall not let your daughter-in-law’s womb remain barren.’ And, so, because he was an incarnation of Vishnu, he installed life in the body of the dead child once more. He also predicted that Uttara’s son would sit on the throne of Hastinapur and bring honour to the Pandavas. But when Uttara’s son, Parikshit, was on the throne, he asked Vyasaji, who had come to the palace to give him his blessings, a very strange question. Parikshit washed Vyasaji’s feet in a bowl of rose water, stood before him with folded hands, bowed his head and said, ‘O wise one, with your permission, can I ask you a question?’ ‘Ask, son.’ Maharaj, all the elders of our family were present at Kurukshetra. There were wise and knowledgeable men amongst the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Why didn’t they understand that in war everyone has to pay a heavy price? That war destroys everything? Annihilates everything?’ Vyasaji sighed and replied, ‘Son, during times of war, even the best of men lose their heads. Besides, that which is fated must come to pass.’ Then, Vyasaji went back to the forest. In those blessed days, rishis used to live for thousands of years. Arjuna’s grandson wasn’t a rishi. He died when a snake bit him. But the question he asked Vyasaji, continued to live long after his death. I suddenly remembered that question when I was wandering through Rajasthan. Indeed, I encountered it at the same time Ashwatthama began to follow me. I felt as if I were walking between two shadows. At first, I was surprised to see Ashwatthama. ‘Oh, this cursed man hasn’t yet completed his three thousand years.’ When I remembered the question Parikshit had asked, I was even more surprised. ‘Was that question still alivc?’ In fact, it seemed to be even more urgent in the present. It hung over India and Pakistan like a sword. But that which is fated must come to pass. Vyasaji evaded the question and refused to answer it. That is why it still hovers over us, demanding an answer. Ashwatthama’s shadow was bad enough, why must I be tormented by Parikshit’s question too? I had to get rid of Ashwatthama. I tried to deceive and evade him. I changed my path suddenly and was sure I had lost him. But, after some time, I realized he was walking beside me once again. He couldn’t follow me forever. I had to get back to my country. He was the evil spirit of this land. He could follow me only up to the border. Who would let him cross it and go any further? I had to deceive him, escape from his clutches and get back home. I would be safe there. I did finally evade his vigilant eye. I fooled him, and before he realized it, I crossed the border and heaved a sigh of relief when I reached my country. I thanked God that I had finally escaped from that evil spirit. I recalled a story from the Baital Pachchisee. But that was only a story. It is only in stories that evil spirits continue to cling to living beings. Anyway, I was free at last and very relieved. I thought of peacocks from different epochs and different lands. I recalled their song. Now, I could sit in the tranquillity of my home and write my chronicle of the peacocks. I was ecstatic. All

the peacocks I had met began to crowd my imagination. Their lovely songs echoed through my brain. Then I had a vision of one divine peacock. It spread its tail like a fan over the entire universe and danced. I walked in its shadow. As I approached my house, I heard soft footsteps behind me. I quickly turned around. I was paralysed with fear. Ashwatthama had followed me home. ‘Oh, the evil spirit has found me here too! How can I ever be rid of him?’ In despair, I cried out, ‘O my Creator! O my Protector! When will this evil spirit complete his curse of three thousand years? When will I be able to write my Morenama, my chronicle of the peacocks?’

NOTES Morenama: The word nama, meaning chronicle, is of special significance in Urdu literature. It generally describes the life of a well-known person, as in Babarnama or Akbarnama. Husain’s use of the term is ironic; he is writing the chronicle not of a famous person but of peacocks (more). Shubhan Allah: Praise be to the Lord. Sravasthi: Place in Teoria district of UP, formerly the capital of the King of Kosala where the Buddha spent many rainy seasons and delivered most of his famous sermons. Vihara: college for Buddhist or Jain monks attached to a temple. Ya Moulla!: Oh Lord! Meerabai: Meerabai or Mirabai was a princess in Rajasthan, born c. 1500, who was a worshipper of Krishna, and is famous for her songs of devotion. She lived till about 1550. Khwaja Moin-ud-din Chishti: a scholar who preached the unity of religion was born in 1138 or 1139 AD in Persia. He came to India and settled in Ajmer in c.1190, during the time of King Prithvi Raj Chauhan. He founded the liberal Chishtian order of Sufis. His dargah or tomb is in Ajmer. Baital Pachchisee: This is a collection of 25 folk tales originally in Sanskrit, in which an evil spirit or vampire (baital) tells stories to the king Vikramaditya. Hiroshima: On 6 August 1945 the American dropped an atom bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later Nagasaki was hit by another atomic bomb. Japan surrendered unconditionally after these devastations.

QUESTIONS 1.

Examine the several references to peacocks that occur in the story and discuss their function and effect.

2.

Make a list of the old stories and legends referred to in this story, together with other references to the past. What is the function of these in the story?

3.

Write a short note on the significance of Parikshit’s question.

4.

What does Aswatthama stand for and how does Husain use this figure in his story?

5.

Discuss the story as an allegory against war.

6.

The image of peacocks and the oil-covered duck used by Husain is a profoundly moving indictment of all forms of violence. Discuss.

7.

Power and the failure of reason are common factors in the myths Husain uses. Illustrate.

8.

Environmental degradation, war and exile are woven together to form this story’s narrative pattern. Discuss.

9.

Comment on the way Husain combines fantasy and realism in this piece. What does he gain by this?

10. Husain’s story juxtaposes tradition and modernity in interesting ways. Discuss.

_______________ From A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories, Translations by Alok Bhalla and V Adil. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.

28 The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi Amitav Ghosh Amitav Ghosh, historian, journalist and anthropologist, was born in Kolkata in 1956. He grew up in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Sri Lanka, Iran and India. He studied in St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and was awarded a D. Phil. in Social Anthropology from Oxford University in 1982. Winner of the Prix Medici Estranger, the Sahitya Akademi Award and other prizes, he has taught in several universities and currently lives in New York. His novels and travelogues include The Circle of Reason(1986), In an Antique Land (1992), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Glass Palace (2000), Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998), and The Hungry Tide (2004). Of his novels he says ‘My fiction has always been about communities coming unmade or remaking themselves.’ His recent non-fiction has shown a concern with fundamentalism and the question of a writer’s response to violence. The following prose piece is from the collection The Imam and the Indian (2002) and was first published in the New Yorker, 17 July 1995. The essay gives an eyewitness account of the communal violence that broke out in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, by her Sikh bodyguards. Violent mobs attacked Sikh-owned businesses and targetted innocent passers-by who belonged to the community. This piece, an extract from the original essay, captures the stifling atmosphere of fear and uncertainty of those days of riot. It also stresses the legacy of violence that mars the relationship between communities in the subcontinent as well as the humanity and courage of ordinary people. The first reliable report of Mrs Gandhi’s death was broadcast from Karachi, by Pakistan’s official radio network, at around 1:30 p.m. On All India Radio, regular broadcasts had been replaced by music. I left the university in the late afternoon with a friend, Hari Sen, who lived at the other end of the city. I needed to make a long-distance phone call, and he had offered to let me use his family’s telephone. To get to Hari’s house, we had to change buses at Connaught Place, the elegant circular arcade that lies at the geographical heart of Delhi, linking the old city with the new. As the bus swung around the periphery of the arcade, I noticed that the shops, stalls, and eateries were beginning to shut down, even though it was still afternoon. Our next bus was not quite full, which was unusual. Just as it was pulling out, a man ran out of an office and jumped on. He was middle-aged and dressed in shirt and trousers, evidently an employee in one of the nearby government buildings. He was a Sikh, but I scarcely noticed this at the time. He probably jumped on without giving the matter any thought, this being his regular, daily bus. But, as it happened, on this day no choice could have been more unfortunate, for the route of the bus went past the hospital where Indira Gandhi’s body then lay. Certain loyalists in her party had begun inciting the crowds gathered there to seek revenge. The motorcade of Giani Zail Singh, the President of the Republic, a Sikh, had already been attacked by a mob. None of this was known to us then, and we would never have suspected it: violence had never been directed at the Sikhs in Delhi.

As the bus made its way down New Delhi’s broad, tree-lined avenues, official-looking cars, with outriders and escorts, overtook us, speeding toward the hospital. As we drew nearer, it became evident that a large number of people had gathered there. But this was no ordinary crowd: it seemed to consist mostly of red-eyed young men in half-unbuttoned shirts. It was now that I noticed that my Sikh fellow-passenger was showing signs of increasing anxiety, sometimes standing up to look out, sometimes glancing out the door. It was too late to get off the bus; thugs were everywhere. The bands of young men grew more and more menacing as we approached the hospital. There was a watchfulness about them; some were armed with steel rods and bicycle chains; others had fanned out across the busy road and were stopping cars and buses. A stout woman in a sari sitting across the aisle from me was the first to understand what was going on. Rising to her feet, she gestured urgently at the Sikh, who was sitting hunched in his seat. She hissed at him in Hindi, telling, him to get down and keep out of sight. The man started in surprise and squeezed himself into the narrow footspace between the seats. Minutes later, our bus was intercepted by a group of young men dressed in bright, sharp synthetics. Several had bicycle chains wrapped around their wrists. They ran along beside the bus as it slowed to a halt. We heard them call out to the driver through the open door, asking if there were any Sikhs on the bus. The driver shook his head. No, he said there were no Sikhs on the bus. A few rows ahead of me, the crouching, turbaned figure had gone completely still. Outside, some of the young men were jumping up to look through the windows, asking if there were any Sikhs on the bus. There was no anger in their voices; that was the most chilling thing of all. No, someone said, and immediately other voices picked up the refrain. Soon all the passengers were shaking their heads and saying, No, no, let us go now, we have to get home. Eventually, the thugs stepped back and waved us through. Nobody said a word as we sped away down Ring Road. Hari Sen lived in one of New Delhi’s recently developed residential colonies. It was called Safdarjang Enclave, and it was neatly and solidly middle-class, a neighbourhood of aspirations rather than opulence. Like most such New Delhi suburbs, the area had a mixed population: Sikhs were well represented. A long street ran from end to end of the neighbourhood, like the spine of a comb, with parallel side streets running off it. Hari lived at the end of one of those streets, in a fairly typical, big, onestorey bungalow. The house next door, however, was much grander and uncharacteristically daring in design. An angular structure, it was perched rakishly on stilts. Mr Bawa, the owner, was an elderly Sikh who had spent a long time abroad, working with various international organizations. For several years, he had resided in South-east Asia; thus the stilts. Hari lived with his family in a household so large and eccentric that it had come to be known among his friends as Macondo, after Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical village. On this occasion, however, only his mother and teenage sister were at home. I decided to stay over. It was a very bright morning. When I stepped out into the sunshine, I came upon a sight that I could never have imagined. In every direction, columns of smoke rose slowly into a limpid sky. Sikh houses and businesses were burning. The fires were so carefully targetted that they created an effect quite different from that of a general conflagration: it was like looking upward into the vault of some vast pillared hall. The columns of smoke increased in number even as I stood outside watching. Some were burning a short distance away. I spoke to a passerby and learned that several nearby Sikh houses had

been looted and set on fire that morning. The mob had started at the far end of the colony and was working its way in our direction. Hindus and Muslims who sheltered or defended Sikhs were also being attacked; their houses were being looted and burned. It was still and quiet, eerily so. The usual sounds of rush hour traffic were absent. But ever so often we heard a speeding car or a motorcycle on the main street. Later, we discovered that these mysterious speeding vehicles were instrumental in directing the carnage that was taking place. Protected by certain politicians, ‘organizers’ were zooming around the city, assembling ‘mobs’ and transporting them to Sikh-owned houses and shops. Apparently, the transportation was provided free. A civil-rights report published shortly afterward stated that this phase of the violence ‘began with the arrival of groups of armed young people in tempo vans, scooters, motorcycles or trucks’, and went on to say, ‘With cans of petrol, they went around the localities and systematically set fire to Sikh houses, shops and gurdwaras.… The targets were primarily Sikhs. They were dragged out, beaten up and then burnt alive.… In all the affected spots, a calculated attempt to terrorize the people was evident in the common tendency among the assailants to burn alive the Sikhs on public roads.’ Fire was everywhere; it was the day’s motif. Throughout the city, Sikh houses were being looted and then set on fire, often with their occupants still inside. A survivor—a woman who lost her husband and three sons—offered the following account to Veena Das, a Delhi sociologist: ‘Some people, the neighbours, one of my relatives, said it would be better if we hid in an abandoned house near by. So my husband took our three sons and hid there. We locked the house from outside, but there was treachery in people’s hearts. Someone must have told the crowd. They baited him to come out. Then they poured kerosene on that house. They burnt them alive. When I went there that night, the bodies of my sons were on the loft—huddled together.’ Over the next few days, some twenty-five hundred people died in Delhi alone. Thousands more died in other cities. The total death toll will never be known. The dead were overwhelmingly Sikh men. Entire neighbourhoods were gutted; tens of thousands of people were left homeless. Like many other members of my generation, I grew up believing that mass-slaughter of the kind that accompanied the Partition of India and Pakistan, in 1947, could never happen again. But that morning, in the city of Delhi, the violence had reached the same level of intensity. As Hari and I stood staring into the smoke-streaked sky, Mrs Sen, Hari’s mother, was thinking of matters closer at hand. She was about fifty, a tall, graceful woman with a gentle, soft-spoken manner. In an understated way, she was also deeply religious, a devout Hindu. When she heard what was happening, she picked up the phone and called Mr and Mrs Bawa, the elderly Sikh couple next door, to let them know that they were welcome to come over. She met with an unexpected response: an awkward silence. Mrs Bawa thought she was joking, and wasn’t sure whether to be amused or not. Toward midday, Mrs Sen received a phone call: the mob was now in the immediate neighbourhood, advancing systematically from street to street. Hari decided that it was time to go over and have a talk with the Bawas. I went along. Mr Bawa proved to be a small, slight man. Although he was casually dressed, his turban was neatly tied and his beard was carefully combed and bound. He was puzzled by our visit. After a polite greeting, he asked what he could do for us. It fell to Hari to explain. Mr Bawa had heard about Indira Gandhi’s assassination, of course, and he knew that there had been some trouble. But he could not understand why these ‘disturbances’ should impinge on him or his wife. He had no more sympathy, for the Sikh terrorists than we did; his revulsion at the

assassination was, if anything, even greater than ours. Not only was his commitment to India and the Indian state absolute but it was evident from his bearing that he belonged to the country’s ruling elite. How do you explain to someone who has spent a lifetime cocooned in privilege that a potentially terminal rent has appeared in the wrappings? We found ourselves faltering. Mr Bawa could not bring himself to believe that a mob might attack him. By the time we left it was Mr Bawa who was mouthing reassurances. He sent us off with jovial pats on our backs. He did not actually say ‘Buck up’, but his manner said it for him. We were confident that the government would soon act to stop the violence. In India, there is a drill associated with civil disturbances: a curfew is declared; paramilitary units are deployed; in extreme cases, the Army marches to the stricken areas. No city in India is better equipped to perform this drill than New Delhi, with its huge security apparatus. We later learned that in some cities—Calcutta, for example—the state authorities did act promptly to prevent violence. But in New Delhi and in much of northern India—hour followed hour without a response. Every few minutes, we turned to the radio, hoping to hear that the Army had been ordered out. All we heard was mournful music and descriptions of Mrs Gandhi’s lying in state; of the comings and goings of dignitaries, foreign and national. The bulletins could have been messages from another planet. As the afternoon progressed, we continued to hear reports of the mob’s steady advance. Before long, it had reached the next alley; we could hear the voices; the smoke was everywhere. There was still no sign of the Army or the police. Hari again called Mr Bawa, and now, with the flames visible from his windows, he was more receptive. He agreed to come over with his wife, just for a short while. But there was a problem: How? The two properties were separated by a shoulder-high wall, so it was impossible to walk from one house to the other except along the street. I spotted a few of the thugs already at the end of the street. We could hear the occasional motorcycle, cruising slowly up and down. The Bawas could not risk stepping out into the street. They would be seen; the sun had dipped low in the sky, but it was still light. Mr Bawa balked at the thought of climbing over the wall; it seemed an insuperable obstacle at his age. But eventually Hari persuaded him to try. We went to wait for them at the back of the Sen’s house—in a spot that was well-sheltered from the street. The mob seemed terrifyingly, close, the Bawas reckless in their tardiness. A long time passed before the elderly couple finally appeared, hurrying toward us. Mr Bawa had changed before leaving the house: he was neatly dressed, dapper, even—in blazer and cravat. Mrs Bawa, a small, matronly woman, was dressed in a salwar and kameez. Their cook was with them, and it was with his assistance that they made it over the wall. The cook, who was Hindu, then returned to the house to stand guard. Hari led the Bawas into the drawing room, where Mrs Sen was waiting, dressed in a chiffon sari. The room was large and well appointed, its walls hung, with a rare and beautiful set of miniatures. With the curtains now drawn and the lamps lit, it was warm and welcoming. But all that lay between us and the mob in the street was a row of curtained French windows and a garden wall. Mrs Sen greeted the elderly couple with folded hands as they came in. The three seated themselves in an intimate circle, and soon a silver tea tray appeared. Instantly, all constraint evaporated, and, to the tinkling of porcelain, the conversation turned to the staples of New Delhi drawing-room chatter.

I could not bring myself to sit down. I stood in the corridor, distracted, looking outside through the front entrance. A couple of scouts on motorcycles had drawn up next door. They had dismounted and were inspecting the house, walking in among the concrete stilts, looking up into the house. Somehow, they got wind of the cook’s presence and called him out. The cook was very frightened. He was surrounded by thugs thrusting knives in his face and shouting questions. It was dark, and some were carrying kerosene torches. Wasn’t it true they shouted, that his employers were Sikhs? Where were they? Were they hiding inside? Who owned the house—Hindus or Sikhs? Hari and I hid behind the wall between the two houses and listened to the interrogation. Our fates depended on this lone, frightened man. We had no idea what he would do: of how secure the Bawas were of his loyalties, or whether he might seek revenge for some past slight by revealing their whereabouts. If he did, both houses would burn. Although stuttering in terror, the cook held his own. Yes, he said, yes, his employers were Sikhs, but they’d left town; there was no one in the house. No, the house didn’t belong to them; they were renting from a Hindu. He succeeded in persuading most of the thugs, but a few eyed the surrounding houses suspiciously. Some appeared at the steel gates in front of us, rattling the bars. We went up and positioned ourselves at the gates. I remember a strange sense of disconnection as I walked down the driveway, as though I were watching myself from somewhere very distant. We took hold of the gates and shouted back: Get away! You have no business here! There’s no one inside! The house is empty. To our surprise they began to drift away, one by one. Just before this, I had stepped into the house to see how Mrs Sen and the Bawas were faring. The thugs were clearly audible in the lamplit drawing room; only a thin curtain shielded the interior from their view. My memory of what I saw in the drawing room is uncannily vivid. Mrs Sen had a smile on her face as she poured a cup of tea for Mr Bawa. Beside her, Mrs Bawa in a firm, unwavering voice was comparing the domestic situations in New Delhi and Manila. I was awed by their courage. The next morning, I heard about a protest that was being organized at the large compound of a relief agency. When I arrived a meeting was already underway, a gathering of seventy or eighty people. The mood was sombre. Some of the people spoke about neighbourhoods that had been taken over by vengeful mobs. They described countless murders—many by setting the victims alight—as well as terrible destruction; the burning of Sikh temples, the looting of Sikh schools, the razing of Sikh homes and shops. The violence was worse than I had imagined. It was declared at the meeting that an effective initial tactic would be to march into one of the badly-affected neighbourhoods and confront the rioters directly. The group had grown to about a hundred and fifty men and women, among them Swami Agnivesh a Hindu ascetic; Ravi Chopra, a scientist and environmentalist; and a handful of

opposition politicians, including Chandra Shekhar, who became Prime Minister for a brief period several years later. The group was pitifully small by the standards of a city where crowds of several hundred thousand were routinely mustered for political rallies. Nevertheless, the members rose to their feet and began to march. Years before, I had read a passage by V.S. Naipaul which has stayed with me ever since. I have never been able to find it again, so this account is from memory. In his incomparable prose Naipaul describes a demonstration. He is in a hotel room, somewhere in Africa or South America; he looks down and see people marching past. To his surprise, the sight fills him with an obscure longing, a kind of melancholy; he is aware of a wish to go out, join, to merge his concerns with theirs. Yet he knows he never will; it is simply not in his nature to join crowds. For many years I read everything of Naipaul’s I could lay my hands on; I couldn’t have enough of him. I read him with the intimate, appalled attention that one reserves for one’s most skilful interlocutors. It was he who first made it possible for me to think of myself as a writer, working in English. I remembered that passage because I believed that I, too, was not a joiner, and in Naipaul’s pitiless mirror I thought I had seen an aspect of myself rendered visible. Yet as this forlon little group marched out of the shelter of the compound I did not hesitate for a moment: without a second thought, I joined. The march headed first for Lajpat Nagar, a busy commercial area, a mile or so away. I knew the area. Though it was in New Delhi, its streets resembled the older parts of the city, where small cramped shops tended to spill out on to the footpaths. We were shouting slogans as we marched: hoary Gandhian staples of peace and brotherhood from half a century before. Then, suddenly, we were confronted with a starkly familiar spectacle, an image of twentieth-century urban horror: burned-out cars, their ransacked interiors visible through smashed windows; debris and rubble everywhere. Blackened pots had been strewn along the street. A cinema had been gutted, and the charred faces of film stars stared out at us from half-burned posters. As I think back to that march, my memory breaks down, details dissolve. I recently telephoned some friends who had been there. Their memories are similar to mine in only one respect: they too, clung to one scene while successful ridding their minds of the rest. The scene my memory preserved is of a moment when it seemed inevitable that we would be attacked. Rounding a corner, we found ourselves facing a crowd that was larger and more determinedlooking than any other crowds we had encountered. On each previous occasion, we had prevailed by marching at the thugs and engaging them directly, in dialogues that turned quickly into extended shouting matches. In every instance we had succeeded in facing them down. But this particular mob was intent on confrontation. As its members advanced on us, brandishing knives and steel rods, we stopped. Our voices grew louder as they came toward us; a kind of rapture descended on us, exhilaration in anticipation of a climax. We braced for the attack, leaning forward as though into a wind. And then something happened that I have never completely understood. Nothing was said; there was no signal, nor was there any break in the rhythm of our chanting. But suddenly, all the women in our group—and the women made up more than half of the group’s numbers—stepped out and surrounded the men; their saris and kameezes became a thin, fluttering barrier, a wall around us. They turned to face the approaching men, challenging them, daring them to attack.

The thugs took a few more steps towards us and then faltered, confused. A moment later, they were gone.

QUESTIONS 1.

Describe the bus ride in which a possible victim of the riot is saved by fellow passengers.

2.

‘It was still and quiet, eerily so.’ What gives the morning its eerie quality? Is it the inability of people to anticipate what was actually going to happen?

3.

‘I was awed by their courage,’ Ghosh writes of the Bawas and Mrs Sen. How did they display this courage? Why is Ghosh so impressed? Were they really as courageous as the cook of the Bawa household?

4.

In this essay Ghosh combines first hand experience of the riot days with information gleaned only later. Is this an effective move? What theme seems to link all the anecdotes?

5.

Give two examples from the essay where Ghosh describes the failure of the state to come to the victims’ rescue during the 1984 riots.

6.

‘Like many other members of my generation, I grew up believing mass- slaughter of the kind that accompanied the Partition of India and Pakistan could never happen again.’ Discuss how this idea of a legacy of violence is explored in the essay.

7.

‘I believed that I too was not a joiner.’ How does the narrator position himself in the riot situation? Is he a detached observer or a participant?

8.

Ghosh describes several examples of the courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Which instances impress you most? Can you find any parallels to this courage in any other pieces in this section?

9.

The state’s failure to act is one of the facts that emerge from this piece. How does Ghosh use this information and others to portray the paralysing sense of fear of those days of rioting?

_______________ From The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces. Delhi: Ravi Dayal and Permanent

LIVING IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

29 Toys Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was born in Cherbourg, France on 12 November 1915. His father was a naval lieutenant and died in sea battle one year after Barthes was born. In 1924, the family moved to Paris, where Barthes received most of his education. An outstanding modern French intellectual, Barthes had a great influence in the fields of literature and culture studies. He is the author of Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), Elements of Sociology, S/Z (1970), The Empire of Signs and The Pleasure of the Text. He also wrote on himself for a series on great writers, Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes (1975). A famous essay is ‘The Death of the Author.’ ‘Toys’ is one of the essays comprising Mythologies, regarding which Barthes explained: ‘The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality, which even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history.’ He uses the term ‘myth’ for the way cultural phenomena work to persuade people how the social forces shaping them are in fact ‘natural’. In this sense, any aspect of modern culture functions as a myth—soap advertisements, wrestling matches, toys, women’s magazines, and striptease shows. All these can be analysed as ‘texts’, and all have an underlying ideology which Barthes brings out into the open. In ‘Toys,’ Barthes analyses the cultural significance of children’s playthings. French toys: one could not find a better illustration of the fact that the adult Frenchman sees the child as another self. All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a small man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size. Invented forms are very rare: a few sets of blocks, which appeal to the spirit of do-if-yourself, are the only ones which offer dynamic forms. As for the others, French toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life: the Army, Broadcasting, the Post Office, Medicine (miniature instrumentcases, operating theatres for dolls), School, Hair-Styling (driers for permanent-waving), the Air Force (parachutists), Transport (trains, Citroens, Vedettes, Vespas, petrol-stations), Science (Martian toys). The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him, even before he can think about it, the alibi of a nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognizes, shrunken to the size of a apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult. There exist, for instance, dolls which urinate; they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle, they wet their nappies; soon, no doubt, milk will turn to water in their stomachs. This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to ‘condition’ her to her future role as mother. However, faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. He is turned into a little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality; they are supplied to him ready-made: he

has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish. The merest set of blocks, provided it is not too refined, implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have an adult name; the actions he performs are not those of a user but those of a demiurge. He creates forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property: objects now act by themselves, they are no longer an inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand. But such toys are rather rare: French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators. The bourgeois status of toys can be recognized not only in their forms, which are all functional, but also in their substances. Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, inspite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down, it does not shatter; it wears out, it can last a longer time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time. Yet there hardly remain any of these wooden toys from the Vosges, these fretwork farms with their animals, which were only possible, it is true, in the days of the craftsman. Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.

NOTES homunculus: a little man Jivaro head: The Jivaro (pronounced hee - var - o) are one of the most feared tribes in South America. They had a war-custom of cutting their enemy’s head and also shrinking this human head to the size of a baseball. The toy-like head could still be recognized as that of an adult. coenaesthesis: the general bodily consciousness

QUESTIONS 1.

What does Barthes mean when he refers to ‘the alibi of a Nature which has at all times created soldiers, postmen and Vespas’?

2.

What kinds of toys mentioned in the essay escape Barthes’ criticism of modern French toys? What makes these acceptable to him?

3.

Use your own words to describe Barthes’ essential point about the difference between plastic and wooden toys.

4.

1. 2.

5.

Does Barthes object to modern French toys primarily because:

they are plastic they are readymade 3. they are literal copies of the adult world 4. they are complicated they rob the child of adventure and pleasure? Discuss.

5.

Using Roland Barthes’ ideas from the essay as a starting point, attempt an analysis of the social and cultural meanings of a contemporary toy of your own choosing.

[Teacher can help here. No suggestions as they may date too quickly]

_______________ From Mythologies. Selected and translated by Annette Kavers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

30 Zero-Sum Game Bibhas Sen Bibhas Sen works as an advertising professional and got the idea for his story from newspaper reports about the implications of the GATT Treaty. The story derives its title and basic idea from game theory which has application in a variety of fields including economics, operations research, military strategy, evolutionary biology and international relations. This amusing and well-constructed satire centres on the figure of Aryabhatta’s zero which is made to play a key role in the war of intellectual property rights that is sparked off by globalisation. It was first published in Katha Prize Stories(1994). Noone would have imagined that the signing of the new GATT Treaty by India would trigger off a world-wide upheaval. The epicentre of this cataclysm was an obscure town called Kisangunj (pop:17,000), tucked away in a dusty corner of UP Or, to be more precise, the dingy office of Kisangunj Samachar(circulation: 127 copies), a weekly tabloid owned and published by one Shewprasad Tiwari, BA, LLB. Mr Tiwari’s extended family had been wheat farmers for five generations and he was painfully aware of what TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights), with the possible increase in the cost of high-yielding varieties of wheat seeds, would do to his dwindling family income. And he gave vent to his feelings in an editorial which was essentially a tirade against the brazenness of the Americans. This might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that the local stringer of a national newspaper, finding the piece outrageously funny. promptly sent it to his headquarters. When Mr Tiwari’s fiery bit of journalistic salvo landed in the editorial department of Hind Times in Delhi, it was found both amusing and topical and so, instead of being tucked away in one of the inner pages, it appeared, unexpurgated, translated into English, as a box item on the front page of the next day’s issue of Hind Times. And since there was a paucity of hard news at the time, most of the national newspapers followed suit. And instantly, all hell broke loose. To understand the reason for the pandemonium, here is the full text of Mr Tiwari’s editorial:

THE UGLY FACE OF AMERICAN TRADE POLICY. We, in India. have been growing wheat for more than 5,000 years—long before Columbus misnavigated his ship to an unknown continent and created all the confusion about Red Indians. West Indians and Indian Indians. In short, long before America (let alone Americans) was ‘invented’ by carelessly compiled history. And now we understand that soon we will have to pay more for HYV seeds because the Americans have done genetic engineering on them to increase the grain yield—the seed therefore, is now the ‘intellectual property’ of America. We find this argument as convincing as that of a

cosmetic surgeon doing a nose job on somebody and claiming the patient as his intellectual property. We cannot help feeling that the American obsession with property (and a marked lack of intellect) have led to the coining of the term, Intellectual Property. Perhaps they would have been on safer ground if they had stuck to old-fashioned words like Invention, Patent and Royalty. Let us give our American friends an example of what Intellectual Property is—or should be. The greatest contribution to mathematics and by extension to all branches of science was the concept of Zero—given to the world by Aryabhatta, an Indian intellectual. The concept was first borrowed by the Arabs and from them through the Phoenicians, it reached the western world. Therefore the intellectual property right to Zero legally morally and historically belongs to India and Indians. So far we have never even thought of charging royalty for this right. But in the changed circumstances, suppose we decide to charge a nominal fee for the use of the Zero, say at the rate of one cent per thousand zeros used per month by the people of America, we suspect that even the enormous wealth of America may not be enough to pay a single month’s bill. Mr Tiwari was letting off steam; the stringer was doing his job and the editors of the various newspapers published this piece as a bit of comic relief from the daily humdrum of news vending. None of them had contended with the hysteria that erupts so often in the Indian Parliament. Members of the Lok Sabha rushed to the Well of the House during Zero Hour, brandishing Tiwari’s editorial before the stunned Speaker and demanding that the Government accept Tiwari’s suggestion and teach a lesson to the arrogant firangis. A substantial segment of the Treasury Bench, already agitated about the arm-twisting attitude of America, also joined in. Words like ‘economic imperialism’ and ‘superpower hegemony’ were being freely bandied about. Business started again only after the Speaker agreed to have a half-hour debate on the subject. The Leader of the right wing ‘nationalist’ Opposition launched into a lengthy diatribe: ‘At a time,’ he thundered, ‘when the western worlds were populated by savages, only the genius of the Hindu tradition could have produced …’ ‘Zero’, an unidentified heckler completed the sentence. A member from the minority community rose to point out that Aryabhatta’s Zero would have remained an intellectual abstraction but for Arab mathematicians. The Left Front Leader described the situation as another example of shameful exploitation by capitalist-imperialist forces of not only the material resources of India but even its intellectual treasures. And it was only fitting that a member of the proletariat (meaning Mr. Tiwari) should focus the attention of the nation on this gross injustice. At first the Government tried to dismiss the whole thing with witty one-liners and inappropriate Urdu couplets. But this only added to the clamour. The few words that could be heard above the din were not just unparliamentary but scatological, leaving the Speaker no option but to adjourn the House more than once. This, however, had very little effect because every time the House reconvened, the members took recourse to walkouts. It was the last of these, which left only the Speaker and the Prime Minister sitting forlornly in the vast empty hall, that forced the issue. The Government agreed to constitute a Joint Parliamentary Committee immediately to examine the entire issue and submit its report within six months. The members accepted the suggestion with the proviso that the JPC be constituted within twelve hours, the terms of reference be drawn up simultaneously and the final report submitted to the House within the next seventy-two

hours. The fact that such speed of action was unheard of in the history of the Indian Parliament went unnoticed. By now, the media, initially sceptical, had also become infected by the virus of patriotism. The Aryabhatta Zero became front-page banner headlines right across the country. International news agencies were quick to pick up the news and Shewprasad Tiwari’s personal fulmination became thundering global news. In the diplomatic pouches of all the foreign embassies and consulates, encrypted reports and analyses sped towards their respective capitals. The longest of these, understandably, went out from the American Embassy. The President of the United States of America was prevented from finishing the last lap of his morning jog by a special messenger who informed him that his entire Cabinet had requested an immediate meeting on a matter of national emergency. In fact, they were already waiting for him at the Oval Office. The Attorney General came to the point straightaway. She was looking haggard after spending hours in consultation with legal experts, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and five of his eight colleagues. She had also spoken to the Chief of the World Court at The Hague. They were near unanimous in their opinion. Under the new clauses relating to TRIPS, it would be extremely difficult to dismiss the Indian claim on the Aryabhatta Zero. Unless of course, it could be proved that the said Aryabhatta was not the originator of zero. The President said, ‘Then let me put it differently. Can the Indians prove their claim?’ The Attorney General squirmed. ‘Well Mr. President, the fact was documented primarily by Western mathematicians and historians, and no one has made any contrary claim since then. The Indians are simply trying to make commercial capital out of it.’ The President turned to the Secretary of Commerce. ‘Dan, where do we stand if this infernal blackmail is allowed to go through?’ ‘There is no reliable census of the number of computers and calculators in use in America at this point of time,’ the Secretary of Commerce promptly replied. ‘Even assuming there are only a few million, the number of times the zero is used every time someone punches the keyboard, will defy calculation.’ The Treasury Secretary cut in. ‘No matter at what rate the Indians want to sell their zero, we simply don’t have the kind of money to pay them.’ In exasperation the President turned to the Secretary of State, ‘Mike, you’ve been very quiet. How do we get out of this mess?’ The Secretary of State took his time to answer. ‘You may not like this, Mr. President, but I think we’ll have to settle for a little compromise. The easiest course for us, of course, is to ignore the whole zero business. After all, the zero is not a commodity which the Indians can pack and ship to us and slap a fat bill for. In other words, there’s no way they can enforce this ‘blackmail’ as you called it.’ The President not only relaxed but actually grinned. ‘Then what’s all the hassle about, Mike? Forget the whole thing and let the bastards go to hell.’ The Secretary of State looked uncomfortable. ‘We have to think of our image, Mr. President. Among the signatories to the GATT Treaty are many poor Third World countries whose sympathies are likely to be with India. I wouldn’t like them to think of America as a cheat and a

bully. We have many dependents but few friends, Sir. Why should we invite hostility if we can avoid it?’ ‘You may have a point there. Mike, ‘conceded the President. ‘So, what do you suggest?’ ‘I suggest we make a show of magnanimity, Mr. President. Let’s be a tad generous about items likes seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and such. May be we can throw in a few obsolete pharmaceutical products as well. I’m sure we can make up the shortfall by vigorously pushing Coca Cola, Pepsi, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken … not to mention our automobiles which no one seems to like … and a few non-critical industrial plants and technology for good measure. I could add to the list but I’m sure you get the drift, Sir.’ ‘Well if there are no serious objections to Mike’s suggestions, gentlemen, I think we have a workable solution which will be acceptable to the Indians. Mike, will you please organise it—but keep it low-key, okay?’ The JPC Report was submitted to Parliament incredibly within the stipulated 72 hours—amidst wild jubilation. Various legal authorities, both at home and abroad, had confirmed that India’s claim to the intellectual property right on the Aryabhatta Zero was legally tenable. But the first flush of victory was somewhat dampened by the realization that the property right clause was not going to be easy to enforce even with legal sanction. Once it was agreed that keeping track of the zeros used by American computers would be totally impossible, a solution was devised by a high-powered task force of financial experts, which most members of the JPC felt was worth a try. Simply stated, the proposal was this: America will place at the disposal of India a sum of two billion dollars every year to be used by India exclusively to defray the additional import cost burden caused by TRIPS on sundry items like seeds, pesticides, pharmaceuticals etc. etc. (listed in the annexure). Items excluded will comprise soft drinks, chewing gum, cigarettes, denim etc. etc. etc. (listed in the annexure). The Indian proposal was duly made through proper diplomatic and legal channels and was predictably rejected by America as arbitrary, frivolous and violative of the spirit of the new global trade treaty. After an unending spate of arguments and counter-arguments, injunctions, stays and appeals which only swelled the bank accounts of lawyers in both countries but achieved little else, the Indian policy makers felt the urgent need for a face-saving formula to end the impasse. The formula, of course, was kept a secret from the public and a ‘working visit’ was arranged for the Finance and Commerce Ministers of India to meet their American counterparts. The two teams met on neutral ground at Barbados, where neither the local population nor the media paid them the slightest attention, since their arrival coincided with the last and deciding cricket match between the West Indies and South Africa in a three Test series. This helped a great deal in keeping the meeting low-key, as fervently desired by both sides. India demanded a one-time payment of five billion dollars in exchange for revoking all future claims by way of property rights on the Aryabhatta Zero. This was grudgingly accepted by the Americans. Further, the demand of the Indian side for price status quo on specific items (as listed in the annexure) was also accepted by the Americans. The only condition that the Americans insisted on was that, in keeping with the earlier-issued guidelines of the World Bank and the IMF, Indian farmers should be asked to pay the full cost for electricity and water. ‘America is concerned about the set-back to the forces of libcralisation that could take place if India

continues with such subsidies which distort free market mechanisms,’ said the leader of the American delegation, firmly. It was 3 a.m. before the Indian delegation came to a conclusion. The Commerce Minister summed up the deliberations. ‘Let’s face facts,’ he said. ‘Our economy is dependent on assistance from the World Bank and the IMF. As long as these two institutions are largely financed by USA, it would be in the national interest to accept these conditionalities. I don’t see why we can’t give in on this electricity and water thing. It’ll anyway help reduce the budgetary deficit. The Government should not lose the American offer and thereby miss the chance to achieve a greater degree of economic parity with the West.’ The next morning, both sides felt greatly relieved at the mutually accepted and honourable retreat from a sticky situation and after the usual bonhomie and fixing up of their next meeting (at Monaco, to discuss the detailed modalities), they left for their respective homes. In India, the positive solution of the Aryabhatta imbroglio was hailed as a tremendous moral victory. Most major newspapers and periodicals carried features on Shewprasad Tiwari and the national channel of Doordarshan telecast a fifteen-minute interview with him. He was described as the champion of the farming community (which he understood) and the embodiment of the spirit of Indian nationalism (which he did not). Various political parties were coaxing him to accept their nomination to contest for the State Assembly. There was even a rumour that he might get a Padma Shri. The adulation, however, had not changed the thrifty habits of Shewprasad. All in all, he was happy. Especially since his calculations had shown that he had saved at least Rs. 3780.00 on the cost of seeds. Quite an achievement. In the meanwhile, the Finance Minister had acted double-quick on the American requirement. This was done mainly to expedite the one-time payment of five billion dollars. And, for the first time, Indian farmers were asked to pay the full cost of electricity and water. In his euphoric state, Shewprasad had not paid much attention to these developments—in any case, the charges were bound to be nominal. About a week later, Shewprasad received his first bills for electricity and water at the revised rates. For a moment the figures failed to make sense. A second look made him realize that he had to make an extra payment of Rs. 2.835.00 for electricity and an extra payment of Rs. 945.00 for water. The charges seemed to be rather high, certainly much more than he had expected, but they were still within his means. Something niggled at the back of his mind. Shewprasad took out his account book and jotted down his saving on the cost of seeds on a sheet of paper. Next, he totalled the extra amounts he had to pay for electricity and water and wrote this figure under the first. He repeated the exercise thrice. Each time the final result was the same. He was looking at: Saving on seeds

3780.00

Extra charges on electricity & water

3780.00 0000.00

NOTES Zero-Sum game: A zero-sum game is one in which the payoffs always sum to zero. Two person zero-sum-games describe competitive situations in which one person’s gain is exactly matched by the other’s loss. GATT Treaty: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Treaty Aryabhatta: Indian mathematician in the 5th century, who is known worldwide for his invention of zero (0). He collected and further developed algebraic theories and other mathematical concepts which he refers to in his treatise on mathematics named ‘Aryabhattiya’. IMF: International Monetary Fund

QUESTIONS 1.

Shewprasad Tiwari is described by others in the story as ‘the champion of the farming community’ and ‘the embodiment of the spirit of Indian nationalism.’ Did he intend to become either of these things? Discuss the character of Tiwari and his role in the story.

2.

Show the relevance of the title and illustrate how the idea of the zero structures the story. Do you think that the structure of the story is like the shape of the zero, a circular movement which ends where it begins?

3.

‘Aryabhatta’s Zero is like an epic hero who eventually wins the game.’ Do you agree?

4.

Discuss the story as a satire on modern rulers and the games they play with common people. Is the satire aimed only at Americans?

5.

What is the role of the media in the story? Does it have a significant effect on events?

6.

Comment on the content and style of the text of Shewprasad Tiwari’s editorial ‘THE UGLY FACE OF AMERICAN TRADE POLICY’.

_______________ From Katha Prize Stories Vol. 4, Edited by Geeta Dharmarajan, Delhi: Rupa, 1994.

31 Indian Movie, New Jersey Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award winning author and poet. Born in India in 1956, she left Kolkata for USA when nineteen to study English Literature. Having obtained her master’s degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, she now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Widely known for her works Arranged Marriage (1995), a collection of short stories, and The Mistress of Spices (1997), a novel, she has also produced several poetry collections such as Dark like the River (1987), The Reason for Nasturtium (1990) and Black Candle (1991). Her writings often deal with themes from immigrant experiences, of being an ‘outsider to both cultures,’ a situation she is familiar with. Divakaruni draws attention to cross-cultural problems in a global world. ‘Indian Movie, New Jersey’ presents the complexities of Indian immigrant experience in the USA. The poem explores issues of fantasy and nostalgia along with the challenges of strained interracial experiences. Not like the white film stars, all rib and gaunt cheekbone, the Indian sex-goddess smiles plumply from behind a flowery branch. Below her brief red skirt, her thighs are satisfying—solid, redeeming 5 as tree trunks. She swings her hips and the men-viewers whistle. The lover-hero dances in to a song, his lip-sync a little off, but no matter, we know the words already and sing along. It is safe here, the day golden and cool so no one sweats, roses on every bush and the Dal Lake clean again.

The sex-goddess switches 15 to thickened English to emphasize a joke. We laugh and clap. Here we need not be embarrassed by words dropping like lead pellets into foreign ears. The flickering movie-light 20 wipes from our faces years of America, sons who want mohawks and refuse to run the family store, daughters who date on the sly.

10

When at the end the hero 25 dies for his friend who also loves the sex-goddess and now can marry her, we weep, understanding. Even the men clear their throats to say, ‘What qurbani! What dost!’ After, we mill around 30 unwilling to leave, exchange greetings and good news: a new gold chain, a trip to India. We do not speak of motel raids, canceled permits, stones thrown through glass windows, daughters and sons raped by Dotbusters.

35

In this dim foyer we can pull around us the faint, comforting smell of incense and pakoras, can arrange our children’s marriages with hometown boys and girls, open a franchise, win a million in the mail. We can retire in India, a yellow two-storied house with wrought-iron gates, our own Ambassador car. Or at least 45 move to a rich white suburb, Summerfield or Fort Lee, with neighbors that will talk to us. Here while the film-songs still echo in the corridors and restrooms, we can trust in movie truths: sacrifice, success, love and luck, the America that was supposed to be.

40

50

NOTES New Jersey: A state in USA known for its high-tech, electronics and pharmaceutical industries where Asians are the fastest growing racial group constituting approximately 6 per cent of the state’s population. Of these, a sizeable number are people of Indian origin. mohawks: reference to a hairstyle with a narrow center strip of upright hair with the sides shaved or glued dotbusters: New Jersey racist gangs that attack Indian immigrants and perpetuate hate-crimes. The incidents include rapes, murders, breaking car windows and crashing family parties. The name refers to the ‘dot’ or ‘bindi’ worn by Indian women.

QUESTIONS: 1.

In what light has the poet portrayed Indian movies in the poem? Are there traces of irony there?

2.

Explain the line: ‘the flickering movie-light/wipes from our face years of America.’

3.

What do Indians in New Jersey speak about? What does their choice of topics reflect?

4.

The poem uses words like ‘safe’, ‘comforting’ and ‘retire’. What do these imply in this context?

5.

Analyse the cultural and generational gaps in Indian immigrants’ lives as depicted in the poem.

6.

Does the poem suggest that Indian immigrants create a false past and a false future in their attempt to escape realities of the present? How?

7.

How is the ‘America that was supposed to be’ related to ‘movie truths’?

_______________ From Thinking and Writing About Literature: A Text and Anthology. Second edition. Michael Meyer, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

32 At the Lahore Karhai Imtiaz Dharker Imtiaz Dharker, who now lives in Mumbai, was born in Lahore in 1954, but grew up in Glasgow, Britain. A post-graduate in two subjects (English Literature and Philosophy) from the University of Glasgow, she not only writes but also paints and makes documentary films. Her poems often begin from an image and are accompanied by drawings. In 1989, the multi-faceted Imtiaz published her first book Purdah and Other Poems, about travelling between cultures. In her second book Postcards from God (1994), a bewildered God is struck with anguish on surveying a city which is gripped by fundamentalism. Her most recent book, more casual and playful in tone, is I Speak for the Devil (2001), from which ‘At the Lahore Karhai’ is taken. Shuttling between two continents, Asia and Europe, and three countries, Pakistan, Britain and India, she has acquired a vast and diverse cultural experience. This is reflected in her main themes, which are drawn from these lived experiences of childhood, journeying, and religious strife. Dharker now feels like an outsider rather than an exile in society: ‘I enjoy the benefits of being an outcast in most societies I know. I don’t want to have to define myself in terms of location or religion.’ She accepts ‘travelling between’ (another phrase of hers), as an opportunity. The poem ‘At the Lahore Karhai’ examines the cultural patterns that are emerging in the new global situation. Written in a humorous tone, the poem takes a critical but sympathetic look at the nostalgia of immigrants in London for their former life back home. It’s a great day, Sunday, when we pile into the car and set off with a purpose— a pilgrimage across the city, to Wembley, the Lahore Karhai. Lunch service has begun, ‘No beer, we’re Muslim’ but the morning sun squeezed into juice, and ‘Yaad na jaye’ on the two-in-one.

On the Grand Trunk Road thundering across the Punjab to Amritsar, this would be a dhaba where the truck-drivers pull in, swearing and sweating, full of lust for real food, just like home.

Hauling our overloaded lives the extra mile, we’re truckers of another kind,

looking hopefully (years away from Sialkot and Chandigarh) for the taste of our mother’s hand in the cooking.

So we’ve arrived at this table: the Lahore runaway: the Sindhi refugee with his beautiful wife who prays each day to Krishna keeper of her kitchen and her life; the Englishman too young to be flavoured by the Raj; the girls with silky hair carrying the confident air of Bombay

This winter, we have learnt to wear our past like summer clothes.

Yes, a great day A feast! We swoop on a whole family of dishes. The tarka daal is Auntie Hameeda the karhai ghosht is Khala Ameena the gajjar halva is Appa Rasheeda.

The warm naan is you.

My hand stops halfway to my mouth. The Sunday light has locked on all of us: the owner’s smiling son, the cook at the hot kebabs, Kartar, Rohini, Robert, Ayesha, Sangam, I, bound together by the bread we break sharing out our continent.

These are ways of remembering.

Other days, we may prefer Chinese.

NOTES Wembley: This area in the London Borough of Brent is the location of Wembley Stadium and a district in which a lot of immigrants from India and Pakistan have settled. The Lahore Karhai: an Indian restaurant in Wembley. ‘yaad na jaye’: a popular Hindi film song suggesting nostalgia.

QUESTIONS 1.

Comment on the significance of ‘Sunday’ in the poem.

2.

Food is a strong way of remembering the past. Critically explore the metaphor of ‘food’ in ‘At the Lahore Karhai’.

3.

1. 2.

What is the importance of

the references to places and the people’s names in the poem? 4.

Write a short note on the use of language in the poem. Is the use of Hindi words in an English poem justified?

5.

0. 1.

Bring out the significance of the following lines in the wider context of the poem:

‘Hauling our overloaded lives…/we’re truckers of another kind’ ‘This winter, we have learnt to wear our past like summer clothes.’ 2. ‘bound together by the bread we break/sharing out our continent.’ ‘Other days we may prefer/Chinese.’

3. 6.

The poem depicts communities with a common heritage meeting in an alien land. Do you think it is a critical depiction or a sentimental one?

7.

Compare the portrayal of nostalgia and remembrance in C.B. Divakaruni’s ‘Indian Movie, New Jersey’ and Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘At the Lahore Karhai’.

_______________ From I Speak for the Devil. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001.

33 Colombe Edward Brathwaite Edward Kamau Brathwaite, poet, dramatist, critic and historian, was born in Bridgetown, the capital city of Barbados, on 11 May 1930. The son of a warehouse clerk, he attended Harrison University in Barbados and left for England in the 1950s to study History at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. He was awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Sussex in 1968. He worked for the Ministry of Education in Ghana before and after it gained independence in 1957, then returned to the West Indies in 1962. Currently he is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University and divides his time between Barbados and New York. Brathwaite has written and published a number of books. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, which consists of Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969), was published in 1973. The trilogy shows how for Africans brought to America, a Paradise is lost but eventually regained through a pilgrimage back to the forest empire of Ashanti and their African past. The third volume moves to the Caribbean world and its history. For Brathwaite, knowledge of the past is the clue to regaining a collective sense of identity. ‘But the way lost / is a way to be found / again.’ He continues to explore similar themes in his books published in the 90s, like Ancestors (1991), Middle Passages(1992), Roots (1993) and Black + Blue (1995). Brathwaite’s works examine the complex Caribbean heritage and its African roots. His is not a search for an individual identity but a collective one. Interested in elevating the status of Creole languages he experiments in his poems to arrive at a ‘nation language’ which is closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean. His poetry is distinguished by play on words, experiments with punctuation and spelling and the use of rhythms from jazz and folk music. The poem ‘Colombe’ is a re-examination of the historical Columbus, and raises questions about the adequacy and fairness of the established image of Columbus as heroic adventurer and ‘discoverer.’ The poem is written from the perspective of a native who tells of the horrors unleashed by the discoverer’s arrival. C

olumbus from his afterdeck watched stars, absorbed in water, melt in liquid amber drifting through my summer air Now with morning shadows lifting beaches stretched before him cold & clear Birds circled flapping flag & mizzen mast. Birds harshly hawking. without fear Discovery he sailed for. was so near.

C

olumbus from his afterdeck watched heights he hoped for rocks he dreamed. rise solid from my simple water Parrots screamed. Soon he would touch our land. His charted mind’s desire The blue sky blessed the morning with its fire But did his vision fashion as he watched the shore the slaughter that his soldiers furthered here? Pike point & musket butt hot splintered courage. Bones cracked with bullet shot tipped black boot in my belly. The whips uncurled desire?

C

olumbus from his afterdeck saw bearded fig trees. Yellow pouis blazed like pollen & thin waterfalls suspended in the green as his eyes climbed towards the highest ridges where our farms were hidden Now he was sure he heard soft voices mocking in the leaves What did this journey mean. this new world mean. dis covery? or a return to terrors he had sailed from. Known before? I watch him pause Then he was splashing silence Crabs snapped their claws And scattered as he walked towards our shore

NOTES Colombe: Though Christopher Columbus was Italian, we know him by the latinised form of his name ‘Columbus,’ which means ‘dove.’ The name was originally given to dove keepers. Brathwaite titles his poem ‘Colombe’ suggesting both the French for ‘dove’ and the French version of Columbus’ surname. In French, a similar sounding word ‘Colon’ means ‘colonist, settler.’ This and the association of peace with doves may render Columbus’s name ironic. C: Apart from being the first letter of Columbus’ name, ‘C’ could also be read as ‘sea’ or ‘see’. Columbus: The Italian explorer and trader who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached the New World in 1492. Though known for his travel adventures and discovery of the Americas, he remains a mysterious and controversial figure even after five centuries. Some view him as directly or indirectly responsible for the death of tens of millions of indigenous peoples, the exploitation of the Americas by Europe, and slavery in the West Indies. Others honour him for the great stimulus his discoveries gave to Western expansion and culture.

pouis: a large decorative tree which sheds its leaves and flowers annually

QUESTIONS 1.

The verb ‘watch’, which appears four times, is the central action in the poem. Distinguish Columbus’ act of watching from that of the native speaker. Is Columbus ‘lord of all he surveys’ or does the poem suggest limits to his vision?

2.

What are the words and phrases used to describe Columbus’s violence, and what impact do they create?

3.

Explain the line ‘our land. his mind’s charted desire’. Does ‘desire’ occur elsewhere in the poem? What does it suggest?

4.

Examine the way possessive adjectives like ‘his’ and ‘my’ are used in the poem.

5.

What is the significance of the behaviour of the animals in the poem?

6.

Do you notice a play with conventional language in the poem? What are the experiments with words and punctuation and what purpose could they serve?

7.

Write a critical essay comparing ‘Colombe’ with ‘The Reincarnation of Captain Cook’.

_______________ From Middle Passages. New York: New Directions, 1993.

34 The Brand Expands Naomi Klein Naomi Klein (1970– ) was born in Montreal, Canada, where her parents, who are Americans, had emigrated in protest against the Vietnam War. As a child she was obsessed with brands so much that she sewed fake alligator logos onto her shirts; as a teenager she haunted shopping malls; as an adult she has become a campaigner against the intrusion of the multinational corporates into every arena and space. An activist journalist and lively speaker, she is at the centre of the movement against multinational corporations that began with the big protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999. She has written for numerous publications and has worked as a columnist for the Guardian. Her book No Logowas shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2000, and won the Canadian National Business Book Award. A collection of her articles called Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debatewas published in 2002. She has travelled extensively in Asia, Latin America and Europe to further her anti-corporate campaign and to investigate the plight of sweatshop workers in poor countries making products for Western markets. Logos are now so ubiquitous that she feels they are ‘the closest thing we have to an international language.’ The very visibility of the big companies affords a useful entry into an understanding of globalization and its effects on people, especially the poor. Since the crocodile is the symbol of Lacoste. we thought they might be interested in sponsoring our crocodiles. —Silvino Gomes, commercial director of the Lisbon Zoo, on the institution’s creative corporate sponsorship program, March 1998 I was in Grade 4 when skintight designer jeans were the be-all and end-all, and my friends and I spent a lot of time checking out each other’s butt for logos. ‘Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,’ Brooke Shields assured us, and as we lay back on our beds Ophelia-style and yanked up the zippers on our Jordache jeans with wire hangers, we knew she was telling no word of a lie. At around the same time, Romi, our school’s own pint-sized Farrah Fawcett, used to make her rounds up and down the rows of desks turning back the collars on our sweaters and polo shirts. It wasn’t enough for her to see an alligator or a leaping horseman—it could have been a knockoff. She wanted to see the label behind the logo. We were only eight years old but the reign of logo terror had begun. About nine years later, I had a job folding sweaters at an Esprit clothing store in Montreal. Mothers would come in with their six-year-old daughters and ask to see only the shirts that said ‘Esprit’ in the company’s trademark bold block lettering. ‘She won’t wear anything without a name,’ the moms would confide apologetically as we chatted by the change rooms. It’s no secret that branding has become far more ubiquitous and intrusive by now. Labels like Baby Gap and Gap Newborn imprint brand awareness on toddlers and turn babies into mini-billboards. My friend Monica tells me that her seven-year-old son marks his homework not with check marks but with little red Nike swooshes. Until the early seventies, logos on clothes were generally hidden from view, discreetly placed on the inside of the collar. Small designer emblems did appear on the outside of shirts in the first half of the century, but such sporty attire was pretty much restricted to the golf courses and tennis courts of the rich. In the late seventies, when the fashion world rebelled against Aquarian flamboyance, the country-club wear of the fifties became mass style for newly conservative

parents and their preppy kids. Ralph Lauren’s Polo horseman and lzod Lacoste’s alligator escaped from the golf course and scurried into the streets, dragging the logo decisively onto the outside of the shirt. These logos served the same social function as keeping the clothing’s price tag on: everyone knew precisely what premium the wearer was willing to pay for style. By the mid-eighties, Lacoste and Ralph Lauren were joined by Calvin Klein, Esprit and, in Canada, Roots; gradually, the logo was transformed from an ostentatious affectation to an all active fashion accessory. Most significantly, the logo itself was growing in size, ballooning from a threequarter-inch emblem into a chest-sized marquee. This process of logo inflation is still progressing, and none is more bloated than Tommy Hilfiger, who has managed to pioneer a clothing style that transforms its faithful adherents into walking, talking, life-sized Tommy dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy Worlds. This scaling-up of the logo’s role has been so dramatic that it has become a change in substance. Over the past decade and a half, logos have grown so dominant that they have essentially transformed the clothing on which they appear into empty carriers for the brands they represent. The metaphorical alligator, in other words, has risen up and swallowed the literal shirt. This trajectory mirrors the larger transformation our culture has undergone since Marlboro Friday, sparked by a stampede of manufacturers looking to replace their cumbersome productproduction apparatus with transcendent brand names and to infuse their brands with deep, meaningful messages. By the mid-nineties, companies like Nike, Polo and Tommy Hilfiger were ready to take branding to the next level: no longer simply branding their own products, but branding the outside culture as well—by sponsoring cultural events, they could go out into the world and claim bits of it as brand-name outposts. For these companies, branding was not just a matter of adding value to a product. It was about thirstily soaking up cultural ideas and iconography that their brands could reflect by projecting these ideas and images back on the culture as ‘extensions’ of their brands. Culture, in other words, would add value to their brands. For example, Onute Miller, senior brand manager for Tequila Sauza, explains that her company sponsored a risqué photography exhibit by George Holz because ‘art was a natural synergy with our product.’1 Branding’s current state of cultural expansionism is about much more than traditional corporate sponsorships: the classic arrangement in which a company donates money to an event in exchange for seeing its logo on a banner or in a program. Rather, this is the Tommy Hilfiger approach of full-frontal branding, applied now to cityscapes, music, art, films, community events, magazines, sports and schools. This ambitious project makes the logo the central focus of everything it touches—not an add-on or a happy association, but the main attraction. Advertising and sponsorship have always been about using imagery to equate products with positive cultural or social experiences. What makes nineties-style branding different is that it increasingly seeks to take these associations out of the representational realm and make them a lived reality. So the goal is not merely to have child actors drinking Coke in a TV commercial, but for students to brainstorm concepts for Coke’s next ad campaign in English class. It transcends logo-festooned Roots clothing designed to conjure memories of summer camp and reaches cut to build an actual Roots country lodge that becomes a 3-D manifestation of the Roots brand concept. Disney transcends its sports network ESPN, a channel for guys who like to sit around in sports bars screaming at the TV, and launches a line of ESPN Sports Bars, complete with giantscreen TVs. The branding process reaches beyond heavily marketed Swatch watches and launches ‘Internet time,’ a new venture for the Swatch Group, which divides the day into one thousand ‘Swatch beats.’ The Swiss company is now attempting to convince the on-line world to abandon the traditional clock and switch to its time-zone-free, branded time. The effect, if not always the original intent, of advanced branding is to nudge the hosting culture into the background and make the brand the star. It is not to sponsor culture but to be the culture. And why shouldn’t it be? If brands are not products but ideas, attitudes, values and experiences, why can’t they be culture too? As we will see later in the chapter, this project has been so successful that the lines between corporate sponsors and sponsored culture have entirely

disappeared. But this conflation has not been a one-way process, with passive artists allowing themselves to be shoved into the background by aggressive multinational corporations. Rather, many artists, media personalities, film directors and sports stars have been racing to meet the corporations halfway in the branding game. Michael Jordan, Puff Daddy, Martha Stewart, Austin Powers, Brandy and Star Wars now mirror the corporate structure of corporations like Nike and the Gap, and they are just as captivated by the prospect of developing and leveraging their own branding potential as the product-based manufacturers. So what was once a process of selling culture to a sponsor for a price has been supplanted by the logic of ‘co-branding’—a fluid partnership between celebrity people and celebrity brands. The project of transforming culture into little more than a collection of brand-extensions-inwaiting would not have been possible without the deregulation and privatization policies of the past three decades. In Canada under Brian Mulroney, in the U.S. under Ronald Reagan and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher (and in many other parts of the world as well), corporate taxes were dramatically lowered, a move that eroded the tax base and gradually starved out the public sector. As government spending dwindled, schools, museums and broadcasters were desperate to make up their budget shortfalls and thus ripe for partnerships with private corporations. It also didn’t hurt that the political climate during this time ensured that there was almost no vocabulary to speak passionately about the value of a non-commercialized public sphere. This was the time of the Big Government bogeyman and deficit hysterias when any political move that was not overtly designed to increase the freedom of corporations was vilified as an endorsement of national bankruptcy. It was against this backdrop that, in rapid order, sponsorship went from being a rare occurrence (in the 1970s) to an exploding growth industry (by the mid-eighties), picking up momentum in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics. At first, these arrangements seemed win-win: the cultural or educational institution in question received much-needed funds and the sponsoring corporation was compensated with some modest form of public acknowledgment and a tax break. And, in fact, many of these new publicprivate arrangements were just that simple, successfully retaining a balance between the cultural event or institution’s independence and the sponsor’s desire for credit, often helping to foster a revival of arts accessible to the general public. Successes like these are frequently overlooked by critics of commercialization, among whom there is an unfortunate tendency to tar all sponsorship with the same brush, as if any contact with a corporate logo infects the natural integrity of an otherwise pristine public event or cause. Writing in The Commercialization of American Culture, advertising critic Matthew McAllister labels corporate sponsorship ‘control behind a philanthropic facade.’2 He writes: While elevating the corporate, sponsorship simultaneously devalues what it sponsors … The sporting event, the play, the concert and the public television program become subordinate to promotion because, in the sponsor’s mind and in the symbolism of the event, they exist to promote. It is not Art for Art’s Sake as much as Art for Ad’s Sake. In the public’s eye, art is yanked from its own separate and theoretically autonomous domain and squarely place, in the commercial… Every time the commercial intrudes on the cultural, the integrity of the public sphere is weakened because of the obvious encroachment of corporate promotion.3 This picture of our culture’s lost innocence is mostly romantic fiction. Though there have always been artists who have fought fiercely to protect the integrity of their work, neither the arts, sports nor the media have ever, even theoretically, been the protected sovereign states that McAllister imagines. Cultural products are the all-time favorite playthings of the powerful, tossed from wealthy statesmen such as Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who set up the poet Horace in a writing estate in 33 B.C., and from rulers like Francis I and the Medici family, whose love of the arts bolstered the status of Renaissance painters in the sixteenth century. Though the degree of meddling varies, our culture was built on compromises between notions of public good and the personal, political and financial ambitions of the rich and powerful.

Of course there are some forms of corporate sponsorship that are inherently insidious—the tobacco industry’s corralling of the arts springs to mind. But not all sponsorship deals should be so easily dismissed. Not only are such broad strokes unfair to worthy projects but, perhaps more important, they can prevent us from seeing changes in the field. If all corporate sponsorship arrangements are regarded as equally compromised, it becomes easy not to notice when the role of the corporate sponsor begins to expand and change—which is precisely what has been happening over the past decade as global corporate sponsorship has ballooned from a $7-billiona-year industry, in 1991 to a $19.2 billion one in 1999. When sponsorship took off as a stand-in for public funds in the mid-eighties, many corporations that had been experimenting with the practice ceased to see sponsorship as a hybrid of philanthropy and image promotion and began to treat it more purely as a marketing tool, and a highly effective one at that. As its promotional value grew—and as dependency on sponsorship revenue increased in the cultural industries—the delicate dynamic between sponsors and the sponsored began to shift, with many corporations becoming more ambitious in their demands for grander acknowledgments and control, even buying events outright. Molson and Miller beer, as we will see further on in this chapter, are no longer satisfied with having their logos on banners at rock concerts. Instead, they have pioneered a new kind of sponsored concert in which the bluechip stars who perform are entirely upstaged by their hosting brand. And while corporate sponsorship has long been a mainstay in museums and galleries, when Phillip Morris-owned Altoids mints decided in January 1999 that it wanted to get into the game, it cut out the middleman. Rather than sponsoring an existing show, the company spent $250,000 to buy works by twenty emerging artists and launch its own Curiously Strong Collection, a travelling art exhibition that plays on the Altoids marketing slogan, ‘Curiously strong mints.’ Chris Peddy, Altoids brand manage, said, We decided to take it to the next level.’4 These companies are part of a larger phenomenon explained by Lesa Ukman, executive editor of the International Events Group Sponsorship Report, the industry’s bible: ‘From MasterCard and Dannon to Phoenix Home Life and LaSalle Bank, companies are buying properties and creating their own events. This is not because they want to get into the business. It’s because proposals sponsors receive don’t fit their requirements or because they’ve had negative experiences buying into someone else’s gig.’5There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers transcend their connection to their earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their businesses, they attempt to alter marketing’s social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration. The most insidious effect of this shift is that after a few years of Molson concerts, Pepsisponsored papal visits, Izod zoos and Nike after-school basketball Programs, everything from small community events to large religious gatherings are believed to ‘need a sponsor’ to get off the ground; August 1999, for instance, saw the first-ever private wedding with corporate sponsorship. This is what Leslie Savan, author of The Sponsored Life, describes as symptom number one of the sponsored mindset: we become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity.

NOTES Calvin Klein used the actress Brooke Shields in his famous 1979 advertisement for Calvin Klein jeans. Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet floated a short while on her back before drowning. This scene is depicted in a famous Pre-Raphaelite painting by Millais. Farrah Fawcett: A poster of Farrah in a red swimsuit had enormous sales. She was also star of the original Charlie’s Angels in 1976. Aquarian flamboyance: the way-out styles of the hippy era of the sixties, which had celebrated the coming of the Age of Aquarius in the musical Hair. Marlboro Friday: A reference to 2 April 1993, when Philip Morris, the manufacturer of Marlboro cigarettes, announced a price cut of 20 per cent because of competition from less

famous rival brands. Instantly the stock prices of many famous brands like Heinz, Pepsico and others crashed, fearing that the bargain brands would spell the death of the big brands. Michael Jordan: World-famous athlete, basketball player with Chicago Bulls. Puff Daddy: singer; started the company Bad Boy Entertainment Martha Stewart: Lifestyle expert advising on weddings, food, flowers etc. in the media and her Martha Stewart Living magazine. Austin Powers: After Mike Myers’ first comic Austin Powers film International Man of Mystery (1997) the name Austin Powers became a popular and profitable franchise under which costumes, wigs, accessories and other merchandise is sold. Brandy: Black multimedia superstar and Grammy award winner. Star Wars: Series of science fiction films from 1977, with many special effects. Brian Mulroney: Conservative Prime Minister of Canada from 1984–93, keen to make Canada competitive in the world market. Ronald Reagan Republican President of the United States 1981–89, who cut taxes and public expenditure. Admirer of Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, 1979–90, who was a champion of free markets and started the wide-scale privatisation of nationalized industries. Big Government bogeyman: Governments themselves promoted the idea that Government controls and interference were a bad thing (in order to allow private corporations more freedom)

QUESTIONS 1.

‘The reign of logo terror had begun.’ Is the writer referring only to Romi here or something else?

2.

How has the logo changed its status since the seventies?

3.

Explain the writer’s meaning in the following metaphorical phrases. Do you think the use of metaphors is appropriate here?

1. 2.

‘Lacoste’s alligator escaped from the golf course and scurried into the streets’ ‘walking, talking pint sized Tommy dolls’

3.

‘The metaphorical alligator has risen up and swallowed the literal shirt.’ 4.

What do the 90s campaigns of Roots, Coke and Swatch have in common?

5.

On what grounds does Naomi Klein disagree with McAllister’s view that corporate sponsorship should not intrude into the cultural sphere?

6.

‘This picture of our culture’s lost innocence is mostly romantic fiction.’ What phrase in the quotation from McAllister describes this ‘innocence’? Why does Klein not believe in it?

7.

According to Klein, what is the dangerous change in the attitude of corporate sponsors to arts that has taken place in recent years? How does a Molson and Miller rock concert illustrate this?

8.

How might ‘Pepsi-sponsored papal visits’ or ‘Izod zoos’ have negative effects on our creativity and social life?

_______________ From No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, London: Flamingo, Harper Collins Publishers, 2000, 2001.

CHAPTER 1

* A most remarkable and striking corroboration of these views is to be found in the religious rites observed on some of the grand festivals which have a reference to Bali Raja, the great king who appears to have reigned once in the hearts and affections of the Sudras and whom the Brahmin rulers displaced. On the day of Dushara, the wife and sisters of a Sudra, when he returns from his worship of the Shumi Tree and after the distribution of its leaves, which are regarded, on that day as equivalent to gold, amongst his friends, relations and acquaintances, he is greeted, at home with a welcome ‘Let all troubles and misery go, and the kingdom of Bali come.’ Whereas the wife and sister of a Brahmin place on that day in the foreground of the house an image of Bali, made generally of wheaten or other flour and when the Brahmin returns from his worship of the Shumi Tree he takes the stalk of it, poles with it the belly of the image and then passes into the house. This contrariety in the religious customs and usages obtaining amongst the Sudras and the Brahmins and of which many more examples might be adduced, can be explained on no other supposition but which I have tried to confirm and elucidate in these pages. * oichneumon: another term for a mongoose.

CHAPTER 21

* Reprinted by permission of Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: A Biography(London: Oxford University Press and Chatto and Windus, 1974), p. 206.

Copyright Acknowledgements The editors and publishers gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reprint copyright material:

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